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Lucidchart Draws $72M In New Funding To Scale Visual Collaboration Platform

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but a good chart or diagram can tell a whole heck of a lot more than that.

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(also known as Lucid Software) is a Utah-based company helping organizations collaborate through visual media. It offers a suite of web-based digital publishing and visual asset creation tools featuring real-time collaboration and integration with popular enterprise productivity platforms.

Today, the company announces that it has raised $72 million in a Series C round from new investors and . Existing investor participated as well. This brings the companys total venture funding to . Lucidchart declined to answer specific questions about revenue and valuation.

In addition to continued investment in developing its product and service offerings, Lucidchart will be opening a second headquarters in Amsterdam in January 2019 to serve the companys 蹤獲弝け, Middle Eastern, and African customers. The company says it has 15 million users using the product in seven languages across more than 180 countries around the world.

蹤獲弝け News spoke with Lucidchart co-founder and CEO about the funding round, his companys progress to date, and plans for the future.

First launched in beta in December 2008 and formally released in July 2010, the company operated at the edge of in-browser design and collaboration capabilities. Recalling the pretty sorry state of web-based tools like Google Docs at the time, Sun reminisced about the eighth-second keystroke lag, among other things. It was all very kludgey, he said.

Sun, an early Google employee who moved to Salt Lake City around late 2009, met co-founder , who at the time had already released the early beta of Lucidchart publicly.

It performed better than anything else in the market at the time, said Sun, speaking about Lucidcharts drawing and collaboration features. Dilts had left college to work at another company prior to Lucidchart and wanted to go back and finish his degree. As Dilts completed school, Sun worked with him to turn Lucidchart into a business.

Our goal from the start has been to help people work the way they think, which for most people is visually, said Sun.

What started out as a simple web-based tool for making flowcharts and simple diagrams has evolved to a more robust toolkit for composing images that overlay data from outside sources onto graphics created with Lucidchart. For example, the company can automatically visualize a customers AWS virtual private cloud as a network topology diagram. It can also import a sales teams Salesforce contacts to create annotated maps of big accounts, among other things. Sun mentioned several forthcoming integrations with more sales and software performance tracking applications.

[bctt tweet=”Our goal from the start has been to help people work the way they think, which for most people is visually.” username=”karlxsun”]

Lucidchart crossed the 10 million user mark and reports having 15 million to day. The company said it attracts 700,000 new users per month.

Although Lucidcharts first investors were based in the Bay Area, Sun maintains that it really benefited the company to be based elsewhere. A lot has changed in the Salt Lake City startup scene, said Sun.

Its turned into a leading market for enterprise software, he said, citing recent initial public offerings by Pluralsight and Domo. He also observed that a number of venture firms from coastal hubs like San Francisco and New York are increasingly investing in Salt Lake City and elsewhere in Utah.

I asked Sun about the prospect of taking the company public any time soon.

The topic comes up, but for now were focused on growing the business, he said, before changing tone slightly. For a long time, we thought it was hubris[tic] to talk about going public. But the floodgates really opened this year. So, now, its possible. However, with fresh funding from private sources, and more available if necessary, the company can afford to eschew public markets for now.

Correction: The original version of this piece stated that Karl Sun was an early engineer at Google. He was an early employee, but not an engineer. He was first a patent lawyer and later transitioned into a business development role when he helped open Google’s China office.

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