DeviantART draws $10M investment from Autodesk

Artist-focused social network deviantART has raised a fresh $10 million round of funding, according to an SEC document filed today.

DeviantART claims to be the top community for artists with 27.8 million users and over 250 million pieces of uploaded art (aka deviations) that generates 2.5 billion page views per month. As a comic book geek that follows plenty of artists, deviantART is easily the most popular choice for many to upload recent work, tease future projects, or just goof around.

While the community has been around since 2000 (making it a freaking elderly citizen in Internet time), it hasn’t become useless or stagnant the way other older communities have, like say LiveJournal. In fact, last year the company announced a partnership with digital comic book startup Madefire that allowed its users to create, share, and sell any work created with Madefire’s motion book tool.

The new investment comes from software company Autodesk, who confirmed the funding to GigaOm today. However, we still don’t really know how Autodesk’s new interest in deviantART will translate to its own business.

The SEC document shows that $10.01 million (out of a possible $10.5 million) of the round was sold to private investors, with the first sale happening in early September.