Freepik Company Marks Milestone with 500,000 Subscribers, Cements Position as Global Market Leader in Stock Imagery and Graphics
Malaga-based Freepik Company, the largest platform of free graphic resources and the global leader in the freemium segment, marked an important milestone by reaching half a million Premium subscribers, surpassing its direct competitors worldwide and emerging as an undisputed leader in its sector. North American users comprise twenty percent of these subscribers and have downloaded nearly 63 million resources in 2021 alone.
With the restructuring of businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company nearly doubled the number of its Premium users in 2020 by providing resources to design professionals and helping them with corporate rebranding and marketing as well as with creating designs for new products and services. The company has also doubled its workforce in less than two years, adding over 200 new employees since early 2020 across multiple functions such as design, photography, programming, marketing and finance. The current workforce of 365 employees serve over 40 million users each month across the company’s three design related products — Freepik, Slidesgo and Flaticon.
“Reaching half a million Premium users is a great validation of our vision as well as our positioning in offering top quality, professional graphic resources to designers and companies worldwide empowering them to create great work at an affordable price compared to our competitors in the industry,” said Joaquín Cuenca, CEO and co-founder, Freepik Company.
Company Origin and Growth
The Freepik Company was founded in 2010 by brothers Pablo and Alejandro Blanes along with Joaquín Cuenca, who happened to be their friend as well as the first Spaniard to sell a company (Panoramio) to Google in 2007. Ever since its founding, the company has seen growth with bootstrapping.
The first product Freepik was launched as a result of the founders’ very specific need to simplify the process of finding images to design and update websites they were working on. Over the course of time, Freepik became an indexer of third-party website images and eventually evolved as a resource of original in-house content powered by a search engine. Right from the beginning, the website generated a lot of traffic, quickly escalating to one million visits and establishing itself as a very helpful resource for design professionals across the globe. On the heels of Freepik’s success, new services such as Flaticon and Slidesgo were added to the platform in 2013 and 2019 respectively.
In May 2020, the Swedish investment fund EQT acquired a majority stake in Freepik Company, making this operation one of the largest exits in the Spanish market. With this new majority shareholder on board, the company’s aim is to strengthen its presence in the North American, South-East Asian and Latin American markets, among others. Freepik Company has thus solidified its position as the go-to platform for the widest range of services that easily adapts to all kinds of users. It offers top-quality resources which are constantly updated and renewed and does so in a way that is suited to each type of user.
Freepik Company also stands out in its immediate geographic area since it is one of the precursors of “Technological Malaga”, the city where it is headquartered. Malaga has earned the nickname of “Spanish Silicon Valley” as several international companies such as Google, Vodafone, Dekra, Fujitsu and TDK have set up or are setting up offices in the city.
