zeroheight raises $10M to scale DesignOps globally

UX design teams are growing exponentially because high quality UX is no longer a nice-to-have. In most markets, it’s now a barrier to entry. But given their new scale, UX teams can’t operate effectively without DesignOps: a brand new set of tools and practices that allow teams to deliver UX at speed and at scale without comprising on quality. zeroheight is a DesignOps platform that provides a central place to document UX as well as design APIs to speed up UX delivery. Our vision is to be the leading DesignOps platform and to do for UX delivery what DevOps platforms like GitHub have done for building and shipping code.

We’re incredibly excited to announce that we are one big step closer towards that vision thanks to a $10M Series A funding round led by Tribe Capital, with participation from Adobe, Y Combinator, FundersClub and Expa, as well as angel investors including Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub), Bradley Horowitz (VP Product at Google), Irene Au (built and ran UX design for Google) and Nick Caldwell (VP Engineering at Twitter).

What’s next?

As is often said, raising money isn’t success in and of itself. The reason it’s exciting is because of the potential it unlocks. Here are some of the things we’re now able to do (and do sooner!) thanks to our series A funding:

 Expanding to San Francisco/Bay Area

We started zeroheight in London, UK and it’s where most of our team is currently located. It’s also where our product team will continue to be based. However to be the global leader in DesignOps it’s important for us to have a US presence – not only does it give us more timezone overlap with the majority of our customers (and potential customers!), it also allows us to hire from a larger pool of the world’s best SaaS leadership. In terms of location, we picked San Francisco/Bay Area because we believe that it’s an important ecosystem for design and engineering, and we want to be part of it! In fact, we’ve already started hiring a sales team there, and I’m planning to move to the Bay Area myself later this year to lead the expansion. When there are fewer COVID restrictions, our plan is to be hybrid-remote – with teams meeting weekly in person in either SF or London.

‍ ‍ Tripling the team size

The funding also allows us to continue to grow the team so we can deliver on our mission faster – we’re about 25 people today but we hope to be 3X bigger in a year’s time! If building the world’s leading DesignOps company and supercharging product teams around the world sounds exciting, check out the many roles we’re hiring for across both sides of the pond. We look forward to saying hi 🙂

 Solving new DesignOps challenges

Our focus so far has been on UX documentation but there are many other incredibly exciting challenges to solve in DesignOps. This round of funding will allow us to explore other problems such as enabling UX teams to get this new methodology adopted widely across their organizations and helping to close the gap between design and development even further.

  Doubling-down on Enterprise

Some of the most interesting DesignOps problems arise at scale, which is why we have many Fortune 500 companies like Adobe and United Airlines as customers. Post series-A, we’re going to double down on solving for the use cases of these complex organizations, whilst also building zeroheight itself into an organization that can continue to support enterprise-scale customers.

  Investing in sales & growth marketing

Thanks to how connected the UX community is, we’ve been lucky to be able to grow to 1,300+ customers entirely organically and profitably with very little investment in sales and marketing. However thanks to this funding round we can invest in building world-class sales and growth marketing teams to accelerate our growth even further.

Thank you

Even though Robin and I started this company 6 years ago, it feels like zeroheight is just getting started as there are such exciting times ahead. But reaching milestones like this one is an opportunity to be grateful and say thank you to the people without whom we would never have gotten to this stage.

• Thank you to all our users and customers ❤️  A lot of you have been with us since the early days and have been super generous with feedback, have spread the word about zeroheight, and have even spent time with our prospective investors! We wouldn’t be here without your patience and support.
• Big thank you to all the founders and entrepreneurs who have helped and advised us along the way – Joe, Mikhail, Murat, Seb, Rich, Greg, Toby… there are too many of you to name you all, but the unwritten and unconditional pay-it-forward ethos when it comes to advice between entrepreneurs is a truly beautiful thing
• Thanks to Matt, Alice and the Entrepreneur First London team for taking a (very) early bet on us in 2015 when we had no idea what we were doing 🙂
• Thanks to Ascension Ventures, LCIF and all our early UK angel investors for believing in us as founders
• Thanks to Tim Brady (Y Combinator) and Alex Mittal (FundersClub) for seeing the potential in zeroheight and backing our vision – being part of the YC and FC communities has been invaluable and levelled up our ambition
• Thank you to angel investors Julia Lam and Andrew Imm for helping put this round together
• Thanks to Jonathan Hsu and the entire team at Tribe Capital for the vote of confidence – we’re so excited to partner with you for this next chapter!
• Last but not least, thanks to our wonderful team who make zeroheight. You trusted us and picked zeroheight as the place to (virtually) spend most of your time, and for that we’re so humbled and grateful to each and everyone of you!

And finally thank you for reading to the end 🙂 If you’d like to join the lovely people below, we’re hiring for lots of roles in both London and SF!

PS: we’d really appreciate if you could help us spread the word by sharing our fundraising news on Twitter or LinkedIn. Cheers!