The company says that it has 100,000 global paid users, with major deals with Microsoft, Google and other prominent tech companies. “Because of our concept model, we can also create the interaction between multiple device interactions without any code.” But what happens if those screens should change depending on whether the user is in the driver’s seat or passenger seat, or whether the car is traveling at high-speed and safety is a concern? ProtoPie is “a lot more expressive than other tools you might see,” she said.
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Most existing software tools focus on validating user flow, so you “click, click, click, and see how the screens transition,” she explained. Jenna Yim, who is chief strategy officer, offered an example of a car manufacturer prototyping a product. The company has collected a total of $9.9 million in venture capital since its founding. Now, the company is charting a vastly growing curve following a switch to enterprise licensing last year, announcing today a $6.3 million expansion of its Series A round led by Vela Partners.
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Over the past few years, he and his team have been building out the full feature set and growing the company within the design community following the product’s first launch in January 2017. ProtoPie founder Tony Kim (Photo via ProtoPie) Kim left in December 2014 after getting fed up with existing design tools on the market and the lack of a clear winner in the interaction prototyping space. The Seoul, South Korea-based company was founded by Tony Kim, a former designer at Google, along with two lead engineers at Samsung and Line. In short, it’s “prototyping as easy as pie.” Those prototypes, once accepted, can then be easily handed off to engineering teams for implementation.
The tool can also adapt prototypes based on readings from sensors like motion detection. The service empowers designers to create high-fidelity prototypes of products, including products that might end up in such places as digital display kiosks, automobile dashboard screens, mobile phones and others. Worse, they often are unable to handle the complexity of modern digital products, which can end up on a range of end devices. Most of the design tools on the market help designers build their own prototypes independently, or collaborate with other designers.
Yet, between the Figmas and the InVisions and the Adobes lies a very specific challenge for designers: finding a way to translate prototypes from their heads into usable products for engineers to build on. Design may be the next entrepreneurial gold rush