In recent months the sector has had various movements that have stood out in the Spanish ecosystem. From the creation of different ‘megafunds’ such as the K Fund to rounds of financing such as that of the startup Tinybird that raised 34 million . But the purchases and sales of companies have also marked an important step during this time and different companies have joined this trend. Freepik , the great bank of images and visual resources on the internet, decided to go shopping and took over the photography filter startup ‘Check my Presets’ from the company called Internet Creators. This is his first major corporate operation.
The company from Malaga has incorporated this company that was launched in August 2020 by the current director of engineering at Factorial and founder of Flamingueo (an ecommerce of trendy and decoration products), Jacinto Fleta de Castro . It is a marketplace for photographers and creative influencers to earn money through the sale of presets (presets) of the Adobe Lightroom application. As Freepik CEO Joaquín Cuenca confirms to La Información , this acquisition was made as part of its growth strategy for the coming years and ensures that they will buy companies that in one way or another will add value to the current offer .
“It is the user who creates and we support him. In this sense, the mission of Check My Presets is completely aligned, since it helps photographers and creators to improve their work, says Cuenca. The economic details of the operation have not been disclosed; however, it was a movement that was made at the end of 2021. It was the creator of the acquired startup himself who confirmed the transaction through his Twitter account: “The figure is not going to change my life, but it has been tremendously fair given that the project had not grown for a few months”, commented Fleta. Although later he did not add more information about it.
The startup will also promote the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve search results
For this year, the company will continue with this trend and will make “some more purchases” with the aim of entering a new segment or to reinforce some of the products that they currently offer through their platform. Some time ago its founders commented to this medium that they would launch a new platform called ‘Vidfy’ destined to be a library of free and freemium videos . It is not yet operational, but Cuenca assures that the team is growing with video purchases and they are also dedicated to their own production. “As soon as we believe that we have an offer of variety and with the appropriate size, we will announce it to our users,” he says.
Freepik was born in 2010 and after advancing during its first years without external funding, ten years later the story changed. The startup was acquired by the EQT fund in an operation that was valued at more than 200 million euros. The founders, Alejandro and Pablo Blanes, and Joaquín Cuenca, remained as minority partners of the company . Even so, they assure that the Swedish fund gives them total freedom for decision-making, as well as for this last movement they made.
This 2022, in addition to developing their M&A (mergers and acquisitions) strategy, they plan to promote the use of technology based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), with which they intend to improve search results and “make the task of our contributors easier and in the medium term to be able to help our users to personalize our content”, says Cuenca. To promote and build this project, the company added the founder of Datasalt and creator of open source projects such as Splout SQL, Iván de Prado .
Last year the company closed with a turnover that reached 31.5 million euros , increasing by 37% compared to the previous year where they reached 44.8 million euros. This 2022 the promoters of the company are confident that they will maintain this rate of growth and one of their main challenges is to gain a greater market share in the United States, a country where 3% of its users come from. Freepik currently has products like ‘Flaticon’, an icon database, or ‘Slidesgo’, a platform that offers templates for Google Slides and Power Point. With these products, and the new ones that they will launch, they hope to add more users in the US.