The creative community is a popular destination for startups developing tools and services to meet their interests and needs as they transition from their traditional offline practices to a digital present and future. In one of the latest developments Domestic – a popular website that creates and sells online video tutorials and courses covering a range of fine arts and related skills and builds a larger community around that content where members can also interact and learn from each other – has 110 Millions of dollars in funding raised for $1.3 billion worth.
Led by Zeev Ventures, a longtime investor, with additional contributions from GSV and other unnamed private investors, this Series D has raised approximately $200 million to date. The current valuation of $1.3 billion is a huge increase from the last round in October 2021, when Domestika closed a modest $20 million Series C at a valuation of $350 million PitchBook Data.
There’s a lot going into the logic behind these numbers. First of all, there is the size of the company today. Domestika currently offers more than 2,000 courses created by 1,300 creative professionals and adds an average of 110 new courses each month, covering subjects as diverse as crochet techniques, animal painting and editing for Instagram. It has more than 8 million members who have taken more than 13 million courses combined.
“And those numbers are growing,” said co-founder and CEO Julio G. Cotorruelo in an interview, referring to the courses but also to the company’s user community. “It’s starting to become a big number. Nobody does as many creative courses on this scale as we do.” The courses are produced by Domestika but in collaboration with the teachers, “great professionals but maybe not great at creating an online course,” said Cotorruelo. “So let’s do this together. Then, at the end of the day, the teachers are also members of our community. The wheel never stands still.”
There are courses in English, French, German and Italian and in addition all courses are subtitled in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, French, Polish and Dutch.
Home Sweet Home
Originally started in Madrid as a humble (= small) online community for creatives and then transplanted to the Bay Area (Berkeley to be exact) when it decided to expand to online learning, Domestika was a bit under the radar. That’s apparently largely because it’s never bothered to speak much to the media or to anyone other than those in its target community — my interview with Cotorruelo, the company told me, was one of the first and only interviews it ever did .
(By the way, his name was not intended by his co-founder, COO Tomy Pelluz, as a reference to the domestic arts, but rather as a reference to feeling comfortable in the community. You’re with your people, Cotorruelo said: “A home sweet home. “)
Domestika has been around for years – it was founded way back in 2002 – but its focus and the attention it’s receiving right now is opening up some areas that have proved particularly popular with users, and therefore investors, of late to have.
An important fact is how the community is organized around a common interest, in this case artistic and creative achievement. At a time when many are turning away from large, general social experiences in favor of smaller or interest-based groups and generally more controlled environments where you are less likely to be harassed and perhaps less of a target for the malicious For hackers looking for the greatest impact, Domestika’s focus stands out. (In this regard, even Facebook has pushed the idea of communities and groups, although I’d say from personal experience that its more open DNA and sheer size make it a daily task for admins to keep those communities focused.)
Photo credit: Domestic
Another is the startup’s focus on e-learning. Education has been one of the most important categories in the technology industry in recent years. Traditional education providers (schools, colleges, universities, but also kindergartens, vocational training centers and really anywhere you might have attended classes) are all turning to remote collaboration services to continue classes when the pandemic made in-person classes impossible. But consumers too — with many of their regular activities restricted outside the home — were all turning to doing more indoors, and self-improvement became a pretty big topic, leading to record numbers in areas like language learning, skills training and more.
Both have contributed significantly to the growth of Domestika and its attractiveness to investors.
It’s not the only company that has focused on building services for the global community of creative professionals and enthusiasts. CreativeLive is another that has focused on educational content specifically for this market segment. others like super site develops tools to help its users connect to job opportunities and then manage those engagements and workflows through its platform. Much bigger players like Adobe have also built a strong platform by building tools and community services for creatives, and you can imagine how they might eventually build more content too, both based on their own tools and more general skillsets, to keep these users engaged.
Domestika’s business model speaks of an interesting approach, which also contributed to its popularity.
Joining the Domestika community is free and users pay for the courses, and these fees make up virtually all of Domestika’s revenue. (Note: some courses are also free, taster courses, to stimulate interest in purchasing courses.) These courses are always sold a la carte, not as a monthly subscription.
“We don’t believe in an all-you-can-eat model,” Cotorruelo said. : The type of commitment you make when you choose a course is different than entertainment.” Prices average between $10 and $15 per course, and that’s why you’ll have forever access to this video and the community connected to the course, who can review your work and give you feedback if you want it. The system is so sticky that two-thirds of Domestika’s 8 million users are active participants.
You can get certificates for certain courses, but that kind of professional development isn’t really the point, he said. “It’s about joy and creativity,” said Cotorruelo, who emphasized that people pay for and attend Domestika courses mainly “because they like it. Sure, you might get a better job or make more money by learning a new skill, but the main thing is joy.”
And on the subject of jobs, recruiting, and professional networking to find work isn’t something Domestika has officially set up as part of its platform, although sometimes it happens by accident. This is not planned either, which is in contrast to LinkedIn, for example, which not only offers instructional videos, but has recently developed just such Freelance Marketplace.
“At a time when it has never been more important for people to follow their passions and unleash their creativity, Domestika now has the scale to impact millions of people around the world through its unique approach to education in creativity” , Oren Zeev, founding partner at Zeev Ventures, said in a statement. “Julio and his team have done an amazing job in realizing their vision of creating meaningful social learning experiences and bringing together curious minds from around the world. I look forward to supporting the team as it continues to innovate and grow.”
“GSV Ventures is so proud to join forces with the Domestika team, who prove every day that learning should be social, joyful and beautiful,” added Deborah Quazzo, Managing Partner at GSV Ventures. “Domestika is fundamentally changing the way we approach learning and creativity, empowering 8 million learners and more than 1300 teachers around the world to pursue their creative passions. We are excited about their opportunities to continue growing and scaling globally.”
