Stealth startup Small Batch has raised an undisclosed round of equity funding from True Ventures with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake, WordPress/Automattic Founder Matt Mullenweg, renown investor Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, Josh Felser and Dave Samuel participating. Small Batch is launching Typekit, a service that lets designers build sites with web-native typography.
Small Batch was co-founded by Jeffrey Veen, who was one of the founding partners of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map, the well-received web analytics tool that was acquired by Google. After the acquisition, Veen worked at Google and started Small Batch in January of 2009. Veen was also the recipient of TechFellow award a few weeks ago.
Details about Typekit are still limited but Veen says that the company wanted to “build a nimble, safe tool that makes it easier for web designers to do amazing design online.” Typekit plans to launch a preview of the service in the coming weeks with a library of high quality fonts and design typography tools.
Legit
Hi Leena,
I hope they succeed in their efforts. i would love to see the preview when its released.
Thanks for the post.
Mani Raj
Havoc Marketing
“renown” investor Ron Conway…
correct that.
Wow, my expectations for Typekit just shot through the roof. They will be able to open a lot of doors with those names behind them and that is exactly what is needed to bring some serious breakthroughs in web typography embedding and licensing.
The header of this post reads:
Evan Williams, Ron Conway, And Caterina
“Fake Invest” In Web Typography Startup
Small Batch …
So, I thought WTF is “Fake Invest” and its the name – “Caterina Fake”
most people who read techcrunch know who Caterina Fake is
I do read TechCrunch regularly and don’t know who Caterina Fake is…. big deal!
I thought it was fake toooooooo – the headline needs to be changed. Who can we reach out to in Techcrunch to update this headline?
This article doesn’t give Typekit justice to the revolution that it will make in web design.
Right now my startup is using sIFR to implement custom typography. For those that don’t know, sIFR is an open source tool that makes any font into Flash elements. It’s a workaround that’s sometimes troublesome and resource heavy, but it works.
Example: http://www.zing...ding.com/detail – The bold orange type at the top is a font called Gill Sans that’s rendered in Flash.
We’re keeping our eye on Typekit’s release because it has the potential to be much more powerful and easier to use.
Check out Cufon – it uses javascript without flash to create PNGs. I don’t know how the licensing on fonts works though…
interesting I wonder if it will work like cufon?
http://wiki.git...ccu/cufon/about
Doubt if it’ll be revolutionary. The world has gone by perfectly well with Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, and Verdana font. More fonts would be nice, but not a deal breaker or deal maker.
You’re obviously not a designer. At one time, “the world has gone by perfectly well” with letterpresses where each letter of a word was laid out individually by hand, in reverse. Technology like Typekit is serious progress.
its like every hipster investor there is.
Will wait for preview
anything ron conway is must see
so thats like 10,000 must see companies then
Font embedding is already a part of the CSS spec. What is TypeKit going to do to further improve typography? Firefox 3.5 adds Firefox to the list of browsers which already support font embedding (the large exclusion being IE). I fail to see how this is revolutionary.
Their plan to help with licensing (by allowing you to “rent” – if I understood correctly) will be the true innovation.
Interesting to read – I think it what stories like this miss is information about business models (esp when investment is mentioned).
Perhaps Veen isn’t talking/revealing that yet – but it doesn’t look the author of the post made any attempt to contact SmallBatch or the investors to find out.
Yawn….anyone should know not to go poking people about typesets…those people (designers) are perhaps the most finicky bunch on the planet.
Agreed as well, this is yet another revolution on something done 20x already.
Type? Yawn. Sleep.
I like the fact that they invested therefore it is….so childish.
This story make me sleepy like warm milk before bedtime (Yawn)
I’m definitely looking forward to typekit. Since I’m going to school for IT Engineering now, it’s good to have a tool I can readily use on hand (without having to understand HTML, Java, PHP, or CSS. Thanks for the article!