InVision Raises $1.5M For Beautiful, Interactive Prototypes
New York City startup InVision has raised $1.5 million in seed funding to help companies answer an important question: Are we building something that people will actually want to use?
The funding comes from FirstMark Capita l. Managing director Amish Jani says he was excited to invest because, for one thing, co-founders Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel are addressing a real problem that they faced. InVision came out of the pair’s web design consultancy, where they say they were frustrated by the lack of tools for creating a design prototype that actually provided a reasonable stand-in for the finished product.
There are other prototyping tools out there, but none, Valberg says, that incorporate everything that InVision tries to do well. He argues that prototypes need to look as beautiful as you want the final product to be, while also incorporating real interactions. They also need to be seen in a real context — namely, a normal web browser. So InVision customers create the screens in Adobe’s designer-friendly tools like Photoshop, then link those screens up to add basic interactivity, and they can share the prototypes through a link (which can be password-protected).