One of Australia’s greatest tech stories again features a female co-founder, despite the overwhelming amount of investment going to all-male founding teams.
It’s the story of Envato, founded by husband-and-wife team Cyan and Collis Ta’eed, with their friend Jun Rung. They created a marketplace for creative workers selling things like WordPress themes, stock photos, fonts, and graphic design templates.
The New York-listed Shutterstock announced overnight it will acquire Envato for $US245 million ($375.2 million) in cash. Shutterstock will acquire 650,000 subscribers in doing so, with the transaction expected to close in the third quarter of 2024, according to the Australian Financial Review.
The husband-and-wife team own 68 per cent of the company and remain as directors, with the remaining portion split between Rung and Collis’ brother, who owns 16 per cent.
Raised in Sydney, Cyan started her own freelance business in graphic design shortly after graduating from university. She later launched the first of a group of online markets for designers and developers to sell everything from WordPress themes to audio files and now much more. They bootstrapped the business, working their own freelance jobs out of a garage to pay for the site build that was initially expected to take three weeks, but blew out to six months.
Key to their story and success has also been their determination to have a life outside of business. They went travelling shortly after launching, with the idea of starting a tech-based business so they could work from “anywhere that had Wifi”. Spending 18 months on the road, they returned to an office in Melbourne and a fast-growing team.
They continued to grow the marketplace in Melbourne while starting a family, and starting and exiting other initiatives.
Envato has never taken on external funding. Built sustainably from nothing into a large tech employer, it’s one of the country’s most successful bootstrapped private companies.
Collis officially stepped back from the CEO role in 2020, moving with Cyan to Darwin where the couple could pursue philanthropic interests, and where they continue to focus on supporting First Nations communities. The company has been through a consolidation period in recent years to focus on fewer products, and meet changes in demand for the product.
Collis said in a statement on the acquisition today that it is “further recognition of the dynamic Australian creative start-up industry and its contribution to the global stage — where homegrown innovation is shared worldwide.
He said he is excited to see the next chapter of Envato and how, “it continues to shape and empower the creative community worldwide.”
Envato leaves a more powerful legacy: showing the possibilities of bootstrapping a tech startup, and growing and building a business while still having a life.