[THE INVESTOR] Korean startup Studio XID, operator of mobile app prototyping tool ProtoPie, on July 5 said it had raised US$3.5 million in a Series A round of funding to fuel the firm’s product development and overseas expansion. 

Korea Investment Partners led the investment, with participation from Kolon Investment and POSCO Venture Capital. 

The latest round arrives a year after it closed a pre-Series A round of US$1 million with Evergreen Venture Partners, Line Plus and Samsung Venture Investment. 

Tony Kim, co-founder and CEO of Studio XID

“Considering the uprise of IoT and the fact that screen interfaces are used in a lot of different settings that you interact with as a user, we want designers to be able to prototype those kinds of products too,” said Studio XID co-founder and CEO Tony Kim. “Therefore, ProtoPie enables designers to build prototypes for the entire spectrum of digital products, in the easiest way possible without code. This way, we would like to bridge the gap between designers and developers as well as software and hardware.”

“As the software industry is growing exponentially with IoT playing a more important role every day, we believe in the potential and vision that the team behind ProtoPie has,” said Joo Jong-ho, the investment principal at Korea Investment Partners who led the round. “Since its launch, ProtoPie received incredible responses from the global digital product design community. We are excited to partner with Studio XID and other investors involved as we believe ProtoPie is now positioned to pursue more significant growth.”

Studio XID was established in 2014 by Kim, who formerly worked as an interaction designer at Google, ex-Samsung software engineer Scotty Kim and ex-Naver software engineer John Song. The firm’s flagship product ProtoPie allows designers to easily build sensor-aided prototypes for mobile apps without the use of coding. 

Since the launch, ProtoPie has enjoyed significant growth, with designers from firms like Google, Microsoft, Nintendo and Alibaba in more than 70 countries adopting the tool.

By Ahn Sung-mi (sahn@heraldcorp.com)