Despite comparisons to high-profile Australian startup Canva, Outfit says it is first to the game in solving a problem marketing professionals in large organisations have long struggled with.

Since launching about a year ago it has picked up more than 1000 enterprise users, which alongside Red Hat include Monash University and The University of Sydney, however Mr Stronge said he believed Outfit was addressing a global problem.

"As businesses see their brands expand to new geographies, and across a growing number of online and offline channels, building and protecting a strong brand is both more important, but also more expensive than ever," he said.

"Rather than replacing designers, Outfit frees them from menial tasks and allows them to focus on what they do best – developing great creative concepts, rather than endlessly re-sizing documents. With Outfit, designers create once and watch their beautiful designs scale across multiple media formats."

Mr Stronge said his new backers had prior experience in helping software as a service companies scale up and would help open doors in the US through their connections.

Cliff Obrecht, Melanie Perkins and Cameron Adams are the founders of Canva, which also claims to help companies produce "on-brand" marketing.

It is targeting Seattle for its first overseas base, but also intends to open other offices in the US and plans to set up shop in Singapore and the UK.

Global growth opportunities


Howard Leibman, co-founder of Equity Venture Partners and a member of the Microequities Venture Capital Fund investment committee, will be joining the Outfit board as part of the funding arrangement. He said they believed Outfit represented a global opportunity as organisations increased the scope of their marketing activity.

"In a little over a year since launch, Outfit has attracted a broad cross section of customers and is closing in on $1 million in annual revenues. This has been achieved without any external investment to date – testament both to the strength of the Outfit product and to the exceptional ability of Bruce and his team," Mr Leibman said.

Mr Stronge rejected the suggestion that Outfit was competing directly against design-based startups like Canva and numerous similar products including Microsoft's Sway.

Canva's enterprise product is also sold as "making it easy to create beautiful on-brand marketing materials, presentations and social media graphics for every organisation," but Mr Stronge said Outfit was bringing a new "brandtech" product category to the market.

"There is no direct competitor to our knowledge that solves brand consistency and brand governance like we do. All documents produced in Outfit are on brand by default, and production is at scale and data-driven," he said.

"We have huge respect for what Canva has done to democratise design, but we are not a design tool ... Outfit was the first enterprise brand automation platform in the Australian market, working with a $2 billion revenue enterprise customer globally long before Canva launched Canva for Work, which is a great tool for small teams to share designs."