Creative Market

Creative Market’s founding team had previously run COLOURlovers, a color and design community started by Darius Monsef in 2004–2005; later co-founder Chris Williams was brought on to help build it, and Aaron Epstein was also one of the co-founders. MetLife once offered $250 to buy a pattern a member had made on COLOURlovers, and the team gave the money to the member, which led them to start building a marketplace on top of COLOURlovers; later, concluding that the marketplace was much bigger than the original community, they created Creative Market as its own separate site and used the COLOURlovers community to promote it. Before launch, the team ran an invitation program that gave $5 in site credit to anyone who entered an email address on the teaser page. Creative Market was founded in 2012 and raised a $1.3 million round that same year from investors including SV Angel, CrunchFund, and 500 Startups.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][2][2]

In 2013, Creative Market launched a Photoshop extension that let users buy and sell assets from its marketplace directly within Photoshop.⁠[3]

On March 19, 2014, the design software company Autodesk announced that it had acquired Creative Market, a marketplace for digitally designed content such as fonts, icons, photos, and templates, for an undisclosed sum. Then CEO Darius Monsef said the company had seen more than 12 straight months of month-over-month revenue growth and had interest in both its next funding round and an acquisition, while Autodesk was looking to develop consumer offerings for the maker movement; Creative Market had raised $2.3 million to date from investors including SV Angel, Alexis Ohanian, and CrunchFund. The entire team joined the Autodesk Consumer Group, and Chris Williams (CTO) and Aaron Epstein (VP of product) relocated to San Francisco. After the acquisition, the team worked for about a year and a half at Pier 9, Autodesk’s maker space in San Francisco.⁠[3][2][3][3][3][3][3][1][1]

On October 11, 2017, Creative Market spun out of Autodesk to become an independent company again, closing a $7 million Series A round led by the venture capital firm Accomplice, with participation from Palm Drive Capital and angel investors Patrick Lor, Don Parker, and Gabriel Hammond; Autodesk retained a minority stake. At the time the platform had more than 22,000 creators selling to more than 3.5 million members, and the new capital was to be used to expand the marketplace, grow the workforce, and launch new products. Then CEO Aaron Epstein said that more and more independent creators were using Creative Market to venture out on their own and earn a living from design anywhere in the world.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

Creative Market is an online marketplace where users buy and sell design assets, including photos, templates, themes, fonts, graphics, and icons, with sellers mostly independent creators. Epstein founded the company to make beautiful design simple and accessible to everyone; as of October 2026, the platform had generated more than $100 million in sales for independent creators around the world.⁠[2][4]

Creative Market: Official website: https://creativemarket.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]