Freepik Company reaches 500,000 subscribers

Freepik Co., the largest free graphic resource platform, reached half a million Premium subscribers, surpassing its direct competitors worldwide, and emerging as an undisputed leader in its sector. North American users comprise 20 percent of these subscribers and have downloaded nearly 63 million resources in 2021 alone. Freepik Co. is a boot-strapped Spanish tech company, based in Malaga, Spain, specializing in producing and distributing graphic resources. It is the parent company of Freepik, Flaticon, Slidesgo and Storyset,

“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 Co.

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. The company has also doubled its workforce in less than two years, adding more than 200 new employees since early 2020 across multiple functions such as design, photography, programming, marketing and finance. The current workforce of 365 employees serves more than 40 million users each month across the company’s three design-related products — Freepik, Slidesgo and Flaticon.

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. On the heels of Freepik’s success, new services such as Flaticon and Slidesgo were added to the platform in 2013 and 2019 respectively. (Founder Joaquín Cuenca will be a guest on an upcoming Dead Pixels Society podcast.)

In May 2020, the Swedish investment fund EQT acquired a majority stake in Freepik Co., making this operation one of the largest exits in the Spanish market. Freepik Co. also stands out in its immediate geographic area since it is one of the precursors of “Technological Malaga”, the city where it is headquartered.