InVision acquires design file versioning startup Trunk

InVision, the design company valued at $1.9 billion, has today announced the acquisition of Australia-based Trunk.

Trunk is focused wholly on file versioning for designers. In the world of engineering, GitHub has provided a way for developers to keep versions organized — developers can track changes, create a separate branch to experiment, and collaborate more easily with other developers by merging branches. But the same courtesy hasn’t properly been extended to designers, who usually spend plenty of time scrolling through long email chains searching for the latest version of the attachment.

The deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, came about after Trunk applied for funding from InVision’s Design Forward Fund. After taking a look at the Trunk business and getting to know the team better, InVision decided to take it a step further with a proper acquisition offer.

“We’re truly inverting the workflow,” said InVision CEO and founder Clark Valberg. “It’s gone from engineering first to design first because, in the process of building, design is the best place to have conversations across the company. Everyone can understand it and strategize. Engineers have had version control since the very early days.”

The Trunk team will be focusing their energy on Studio, InVision’s design tool, which launched about a year ago.

The launch of Studio was the first time that InVision truly showed its hand, revealing efforts to go well beyond a simple collaboration tool and become the Salesforce of the design world.

In order to do so, InVision is building bridges between itself and other design focused startups, whether its through integrations, investment, or straight-up acquisition.

“As a growing company with some 800 employees, we’re always looking for people who are passionate about each individual slice of this design pie as possible,” said Valberg. “After using Trunk’s technology, we realized that they really really really care about this slice around design file versioning.”

The InVision collaboration suite currently boasts a place at 98 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, with more than 5 million users. This means the company is shifting its focus squarely to Studio. Design collaboration software was a relatively novel idea back when InVision launched, but design software wasn’t. With Studio, InVision is taking on incumbents like Adobe and other newcomers such as Sketch.

Of course, the feature set of Studio itself is important in beating out other design tools, but InVision believes that the real deal closer is integration with the deeper back-end of InVision’s suite of tools, such as InVision collaboration and now, design file versioning.

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