Our Series A in Whimsical: Where Great Ideas Take Shape

Today I’m excited to share Accel led the Series A in Whimsical, a product “Where Great Ideas Take Shape.”

I think I first heard about Whimsical sometime in 2018. It might have been from Hacker News or a thoughtful friend who used it, I’m not sure. Whimsical is one of those tools where once you take note of it, you start seeing it everywhere. Then I started hearing about it from a bunch of friends at Stripe who loved using it. One of my favorite run-ins with Whimsical was this excellent flow chart of Slack’s Notifications. And then I started recommending it to people, mostly because I was so confident they would appreciate it!

Whimsical does a number of things incredibly well, but allow me a moment to zoom in on Whimsical Wireframes to illustrate a bit of what I love about the company.

I have always been fascinated by the lightweight wireframe space. At various points I’ve used Visio, Lucidcharts, Balsamiq, Mockingbird, etc. In particular, I was a big Balsamiq fan. Those tools helped me be incredibly productive, but I always felt there was some space for a better, faster product. Every bit of a tool’s speed matters in an area where the value is how quickly one can express and iterate ideas. The first time I used Whimsical it was immediately clear that it was built for speed and precision (it’s delightful!). To understand how much the team thinks about speed, check out this incredible blog post!

Whimsical brings that detail to all of their product “primitives.” Flowcharts, Wireframes, Mind Maps, Sticky Notes, and Docs. Perhaps most impressive, they bring it to how those primitives interact! Now a Product Requirement Doc can be seamlessly interwoven with early Wireframe/Mockups, and a Flowchart of the user journey, and even Sticky Notes to track simple tasks. That seamless integration is an incredible productivity boost for the best teams.

In early January 2020, I finally remembered what I do for a living and reached out to Kaspars about investing. We chatted a few times and I made plans to head out to Colorado to visit him in March 2020... those plans fell through. Over the next year-and-a-half, we got to know each other pretty well. Kaspars is deeply thoughtful, humble, and meticulous about the details. His co-founder, Steve, is understated and his design acumen shines through in the product. At Accel, we have a long history of investing in collaboration tools like Slack, Dropbox, Atlassian, and Frame.io to name a few - and in Kaspars and Steve, we see a similar vision for collaboration and dedication to the future of work.

As we got to know each other better and I became excited about investing, Kaspars and Steve saw that with more resources they could move faster towards their vision. Head over to their blog for more on the company and why they chose to raise funding. I’m excited, and privileged, to join the Whimsical team and help however I can.

If you all want to join the Whimsical team, they’re hiring.