Adobe's intention to acquire Figma for $20 billion, announced earlier mid-September, sent shockwaves through the design industry, and not all of them positive. On a business level, it's a no-brainer that Adobe has snapped up a rival whose design collaboration tools have picked up significantly more traction than Adobe's home-grown XD platform. On a community level, however, designers and others were upset: they had adopted Figma precisely because it was not Adobe.

Now, a Spanish startup called Penpot -- which is taking a new approach to design collaboration through an open source platform that brings designers and developers into the mix simultaneously -- says that it's been seeing a huge amount of adoption since the Figma deal. Today, it's announcing some funding to capitalize on that, a reminder of how disruption is always around the corner.

The company, based out of Madrid, has picked up $8 million in a round led by Decibel out of the U.S., with participation also from Athos and, significantly, several individuals notable for their roles in creative and developer ecosystems.

They include Figma's former COO (and current VSCO president) Eric Wittman, Cisco's VP of developer relations strategy Grace Francisco, and Google's "Fonts leader" Dave Crossland. Athos is a repeat backer: it also invested in an earlier $2.6 million round in Kaleidos, PenPot's parent company that has largely been operating as a bootstrapped operation since 2011 and produces another open-source tool, the project management platform Taiga, which today is used by more than a million people.

Even before the Adobe-Figma news hit, Penpot had been making a name for itself. Launched a year ago, the startup has seen tens of thousands of downloads and 15,000 "stars" on GitHub. The 10,000 companies among its active users include Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Tencent, Bytedance and Mozilla.

Before September 15, Penpot's CEO and co-founder Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz said that sign-ups were growing at around 40% per month: after Adobe's news, that figure ballooned to 5,600%, and has stayed consistent since then. On-premise deployments have also grown 400%.