Minted, founded in 2007, operates an online marketplace that sells printed goods—wedding invitations, greeting cards, notebooks, stationery and wall art—created by a community of independent artists. Designs are crowdsourced and customers vote on favorites, and the company uses predictive analytics to forecast bestsellers. Minted leverages its design and consumer-preference data across direct sales and a growing wholesale and licensing business for larger retailers. The company says it is profitable on an EBITDA basis and is on track to post "low hundreds of millions" in revenue this year. Minted plans to double down on its wholesale and licensing initiative, expecting that line to become a nine-figure business and to represent roughly 50% of earnings in four years. Proceeds from the new funding will be used to build out supply chain, expand the team, and experiment with new strategies including its first brick-and-mortar store on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street. Minted is a curated marketplace that connects consumers with independent artists to create original art, stationery, and textiles. The platform has run monthly design and artwork competitions since 2007, attracting contributions from over 6,000 artists, photographers and designers across more than 40 countries. Customers can access custom-designed fabrics curated from over 1,400 submissions; submitted designs are refined by the artist community and winners are selected through crowdsourcing and analytics. Minted manages all aspects of business operations for winning designs, including manufacturing and customer service. The company is activating a new storefront model to give artists and designers the opportunity to run their own businesses using Minted’s manufacturing and customer service platform. Minted recently raised $38M in a funding round and added e-commerce veteran Toby Lenk to its Board of Directors. Minted is an online marketplace that crowdsources and sells graphic design and art from a global community of thousands of independent designers. Led by Founder and CEO Mariam Naficy, the company produces premium designed products for the home, holidays, and occasions. Minted has announced a crowdsourcing retail partnership providing West Elm with an exclusive selection of Minted-branded wall art sourced through competitions on its community platform. The company intends to use the new capital to scale operations and to extend its crowdsourcing model to new categories, including wall art and party decor. Minted has more than 115 full-time employees and plans to continue hiring for its engineering, design, and business teams. To date the company has raised $52M. Minted operates a global community of independent graphic designers who submit and vote on designs, with the community curating what the company sells. The company prints and retails winning designs as paper goods—holiday cards, wedding invitations, save‑the‑dates, birth announcements, business cards, notebooks, calendars and art prints—paying designers a percentage of the retail price and offering peer design critiques. Minted runs design contests (for example the Art Print Challenge) to surface new talent and occasionally partners with sites like One Kings Lane to sell winners' work. The site positions itself with competitive price points that the article says are below many stationery competitors. CEO and founder Mariam Naficy says revenue has been growing several hundred percent per year since 2008. The new funding is intended to support recruiting and growth opportunities, beginning with new product lines. Minted operates an online marketplace for premium personal stationery that sources designs through public competitions and popular votes. The company selects winning designs from submissions, features the designers, and sells the winning stationery on its site. Minted handles promotion, printing costs, shipping, customization and customer service, and prints to order to minimize inventory risk. Designers receive five percent of retail revenue for pieces sold on the platform. Typical pricing cited in the articles is about $175 for 100 cards, with hand-crafted professional designs priced around $700–$800. The company has been seeded with well-respected independent brands, many on exclusive contracts, and targets a largely offline $9+ billion personal-stationery market.

Total raised

$295M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Series E

Latest activity

Dec 2018