Awesomic, a Ukrainian platform that matches businesses with designers, has secured $800,000 in equity funding, reports Tech.eu.
Among the investors are three funds — including Flyer One Ventures, based in London but with Ukrainian roots, and Pioneer Fund, a serial investor in Y Combinator startups — as well as two Y Combinator executives, Michael Seibel and Jared Friedman.
The fresh funding will help the company expand internationally and increase its resilience amid the war in Ukraine. The startup is now headquartered in San Francisco.
Founded in July 2020, Awesomic matches companies with vetted designers instantly, with the help of AI. Customers pay a flat monthly fee to have “all of [their] design tasks completed.”
The platform is the brainchild of Roman Sevastyanov and Anastasia Pavlyshyna, “a young software engineer and a digital marketer who met on Tinder,” the startup says on its website.
“Algorithms matched us — now, we’ve created an algorithm to help others, matching businesses with the best-fit designers,” Awesome claims.
So far, “over 10,000 projects” have been completed via the platform for “more than 1,500 clients.”
Awesomic has raised three rounds of funding in total, according to CrunchBase data. The first one came immediately after the company’s inception, in the summer of 2020. The second one, a $2 million pre-seed round, was closed in late 2021, involving 17 investors, including Y Combinator alongside funds and individual investors.
In the summer of 2022, Awsomic received non-equity funding and mentorship support from Google as part of the US giant’s program to support Ukrainian startups amid the war.