How it started
In 2008, a software engineer named Peldi was working at Adobe and kept running into the same problem: there was no good way to sketch a product idea quickly, without it turning into a full design project. So he built one himself and put it on the internet.
People bought it. A lot of people.
Nearly two decades later, Balsamiq is still independent, still bootstrapped, and still obsessed with the same thing: helping teams get from fuzzy idea to shared understanding (and clean handoff) as fast as possible.
We've never taken outside funding. We've never optimized for growth at the expense of the product. We've just kept building something people find genuinely useful, and tried to be the kind of company we'd want to do business with.
What we believe
We've never believed people should be pigeonholed into a single job title. The best teams are ones where a developer can sketch a screen, a PM can shape a flow, and a designer can weigh in on the build. We believe:
- Great products start with understanding people.
- Product team roles should be fluid, not fixed.
- Fidelity should enable good thinking, not squash it.
- Being a good company - the kind you’d want to exist - matters.
By the numbers
2008
Founded in Bologna, Italy
17 years
Bootstrapped and independent
16,000+
Teams who use Balsamiq every month
1,400,000+
Purchases across 204 countries and territories
Meet the Balsamìci
We call ourselves Balsamìci, a mashup of Balsamiq and amici, the Italian word for friends. It's a little cheesy (we lean into it).
We're a small, remote team spread across the US and Europe. We've been working this way since before it was cool. If you reach out to support, you may have even spoken to a few of us.
How we work
We're remote-first, headquartered in a non-office office in Bologna, Italy. We work async by default, with a “Golden Hour” of overlap for one hour a day. Meetings are rare here too, we try writing it up or recording a video instead.
We run on a blend of adapted EOS and Shape Up, which you can learn more about in our company playbook.
A few things we're proud of:
- Minimum vacation policy (seriously, take your days)
- Profit sharing with the team
- Time off for exercise built into the workday
- Small project teams with the power to decide
