- Universe — an app that has empowered over 500,000 creators to build amazing websites and online stores from just their phones — recently announced $30 million in Series B. These are the details.
Universe — an app that has empowered over 500,000 creators to build amazing websites and online stores from just their phones — recently announced $30 million in Series B funding to unlock the internet’s next generation of creators and entrepreneurs. And Universe makes creating a website easy thanks to a magical GRID, which breaks all the elements down into simple Lego-like building blocks.
The company’s Series B funding round was led by Addition with participation from existing investors Google Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, Box Group, and more. And with this funding round, Universe will double down on its GRID system, expand its commerce offering for upstart brands, and bring its GRID platform to more platforms and devices. This funding round will also be used to build awareness, especially in new markets, and help the company continue to build a distributed team with top talent across the country.
Plus Universe will use this funding to explore how it can help its creators benefit from the coming web3 frontier by bringing its signature no-code approach to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized commerce. The GRID is the heart of Universe’s web-building app as it is an intuitive and gesture-based interface that allows anyone to build a site by tapping, dragging, and pinching simple building blocks.
Universe now powers over half a million active sites, ranging from spiked gothic hoodies and sushi delivery in a pizza box to a talented photographer and the world’s best key lime pie. And with ‘link-in-bios’ becoming increasingly necessary for anyone with a business, Universe’s GRID gives creators an incredibly easy-to-use and powerful platform for beautiful no-code creation and commerce.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our mission is to empower everyone to build the internet, and our GRID system is a new paradigm for creating online—easy enough for anyone to use, but powerful enough to make something truly original. With this round of funding, we’ll be able to radically expand our set of tools and bring Universe to millions of more creators and entrepreneurs around the world. We can’t wait to see what they build.”
— Joseph Cohen, CEO and founder of Universe
“With its GRID system, Universe has a fundamentally differentiated product in a huge and open-ended market. We were struck by the company’s recent growth and its unique combination of amazing mobile creation tools with a powerful commerce engine. Universe is poised to be the tool that unlocks the internet’s next generation of creators and entrepreneurs. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be backing this team.”
— Lee Fixel, founder of Addition
