Aussie startup Qwilr sets sights on global growth with AUD$1.5 million funding

Qwilr, the startup that turns boring, offline documents into beautiful web pages, has raised AUD$1.5m (USD$1.12m) from venture capital firm Point Nine. It is the global firm’s first investment in an Australian company.

Qwilr brings to business documents all the benefits of professional web development design, without the hassle or high costs. By utilising the web Qwilr Pages can be brought to life with everything from embedded videos, interactive charts and customer surveys, to more complex tasks like streamlined sales processes across Accept, E-Sign and Payments.

While Qwilr makes creating beautiful work simple, the high-impact visuals of Qwilr Pages are supported by a powerful backend that provides detailed analytics (helping customers see who is viewing the document and what sections they care about), strong security, and integrations with tools that have become essential for many businesses, such as Salesforce, Slack and Xero. Quite simply, Qwilr helps you do business better and look good doing it.

For Point Nine, the VC firm behind SaaS startup heavyweights Zendesk, Typeform and Unbounce, to invest in Qwilr is a testament to what the team has achieved in such a short time. The firm’s co-founder and Managing Partner, Christoph Janz, is set to join Qwilr’s board.

“Twenty-five years ago, the default format for sales proposals and many other documents was still paper. Over the last 20 years or so, Word, Powerpoint and PDF documents became the new standard. I’m pretty sure that in the next 10 years there will be another paradigm shift. We’re confident that Qwilr can play a key role in building the document of the future and we’re thrilled to be partners on that journey,” Janz said.

Since raising its first AUD$500,000 from the Sydney Seed Fund and Macdoch Ventures in 2015, Qwilr has grown swiftly — tripling its team, opening a US office, and growing revenue 45 times over. To date, there have been more than 200,000 Qwilr Pages created. Qwilr is used by over 40,000 businesses (everyone from Zillow to Colliers) in more than 80 countries, and it has helped customers generate over a quarter of a billion dollars in accepted quotes on the platform.

Qwilr will use the AUD$1.5m from Point Nine to further expand the product and team.

“Since launching, Qwilr has helped thousands of businesses find the elusive balance between form and function. In the months ahead, we’re going to further refine and develop our product offering and we won’t stop until creating web content is so easy, simple and fast that literally anyone can do it,” said Qwilr co-founder and CEO Dylan Baskind.

Qwilr will also make a series of strategic hires across its design, engineering and marketing teams, to further its international growth and solidify its position as a major player in web document design.

“We are looking for talent ready for a career challenge in a fast paced, collaborative team. Our company is tackling fascinating, complex problems in design to stay ahead of the curve and we are on the hunt for technically-minded, out-of-the-box thinkers to join us,” said Qwilr co-founder, Mark Tanner.

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