Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, First Round Capital and Industry Luminaries Unite to Back New Start-up With $7.5 Million in Series A Funding
PROVIDENCE, R.I.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Swipely (swipely.com), an online service that gives users an easy way to turn their purchases into conversations, announced it has completed its Series A round of financing, and a preview version of its service is now available by invitation. Index Ventures led the Series A round, with participation from Greylock Partners, First Round Capital, and a number of well-known angel investors.
“Angus and the team have created the most compelling approach to enable this behavior and we're very excited to be investors in Swipely.”
"Our mission is to fundamentally change the way consumers shop and share by adding value to every swipe," said Angus Davis, Founder and CEO of Swipely. "Our service will transform everyday purchases at restaurants, movies or online retailers into conversations with friends, personalized recommendations and opportunities to save money."
Founded and backed by veterans of Tellme, Microsoft, Netscape, eBay, LinkedIn and PayPal, Swipely provides a secure platform for consumers to recommend purchase experiences, discover new places and products through trusted friends, save money, and have more fun shopping.
Enter Swipely
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Every Purchase "Should" Be a Swipe! |
On Swipely, every purchase is a "swipe." Users start swiping by following an easy and secure sign-up process to import purchases from their credit or debit card accounts. Users can also import purchases from email for purchases made at any online store.
Users can rate their swipes and add comments or photos. Many swipes are geo-located automatically to specific store locations. Swipely also supports product details by integrating catalogs and menus from more than 250,000 retail and restaurant locations, allowing users to start conversations around specific outfits, meals, songs, movies, gadgets and millions of other products.
Discovering a new restaurant, movie or pair of shoes is easy on Swipely when users follow their friends. Upon seeing a great swipe for a new restaurant, users can click to see it on the map, and add it to their wishlist. Discovering music, movies and apps is easy, too -- users can just press play on select swipes to hear a song preview, see a video trailer or browse app screen shots.
Swipely places a strong emphasis on protecting consumer privacy and security, and has passed reviews and audits from leading third party security and privacy organizations. Users have complete control over which swipes get posted, and the specific amount spent remains private.
Industry Leaders Across Coasts and Continents Unite to Back Swipely
Swipely's Series A funding was led by Index Ventures, with Greylock Partners and previous investor First Round Capital also participating. Danny Rimer of Index Ventures will join Swipely's board of directors, and Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partners will serve as an observer on Swipely's board. To date, Swipely has raised $8.5 million in funding.
Swipely will use the funding to continue to grow the team and explore other benefits for consumers and businesses, including new ways for users to shop, share and save, and new tools to help businesses attract, understand and reward customers.
"We believe that the convergence of payments and social media is the natural next step in the evolution of the web. The notion of being able to use day-to-day transactions as a conversation element makes a great deal of sense and we expect it to be extremely popular," said Danny Rimer, General Partner at Index Ventures. "Angus and the team have created the most compelling approach to enable this behavior and we're very excited to be investors in Swipely."
"We have been working with Angus since day one, when it was clear he had identified a huge opportunity with Swipely to change the way we shop and save on the Web," said Josh Kopelman, Managing Partner at First Round Capital. "I'm excited to continue my support of Angus and his team as they take what started out as a visionary idea and turn it into a reality that will reinvent the way we talk about our shopping experiences."
"Swipely gets it right. Swipely offers a great service that helps consumers benefit from their card swipes," said Reid Hoffman, Partner at Greylock, and Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at LinkedIn. "Furthermore, the company has a great team: Angus is a seasoned tech entrepreneur with an impressive track record and it is great to work with Danny and Josh."
Other Swipely investors include Lowercase Capital led by Chris Sacca, former head of special initiatives for Google; Keith Rabois, EVP of Slide, and former PayPal and LinkedIn executive; SV Angel led by Ron Conway; Anton Commissaris, previously SVP of revenue and business development at Mint.com and now director at Intuit; Lee Hower, venture capitalist and angel investor; Charles Moldow, former Tellme executive; and Emil Michael, White House Fellow and former Tellme executive. Davis is also a significant investor in the company.
About Swipely
Founded and backed by Internet veterans, Swipely is an online service that changes the way people shop, share and save by turning purchases into conversations. Swipely provides a secure platform for consumers to recommend purchase experiences, discover new places and products through trusted friends, save money, and have more fun shopping. Swipely is located in Providence, Rhode Island, and is looking for passionate individuals to join its growing team. Visit www.swipely.com and start swiping!
About Index Ventures
Index Ventures is a leading European venture capital firm active in technology venture investing since 1996. The firm is dedicated to helping top entrepreneurial teams in the Information Technology and Life Science sectors build their companies into market defining global leaders. The firm has offices in Geneva, London and Jersey and focuses on investments from seed through growth stage companies, across Europe, Israel and the United States. Portfolio companies include Criteo, Boku, OpenX, Telegent, Just-Eat and Oanda and recent exits include Last.fm, Skype, MySQL and Playfish. For more information, please visit www.indexventures.com
About First Round Capital
First Round Capital is the nation's most active seed-stage venture capital firm -- and is dedicated to helping talented entrepreneurs build remarkable companies. First Round Capital typically funds pre-revenue companies -- and often provides a company's first outside capital. The firm invests nationally with offices in San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York. Additional information on First Round Capital is available at http://www.firstround.com.
About Greylock Partners
Greylock partners with entrepreneurs to help them build market-leading businesses. Over the past 45 years the firm has worked with hundreds of companies, 150 of which have gone on to IPOs and 100 of which have gone on to profitable M&A events, including Ascend Communications, CheckFree, CipherTrust, Constant Contact, Continental Cable, Decru, Data Domain, DoubleClick, Farecast, Internet Security Systems, Ikanos, Legato, Media Metrix, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Openwave, Open Market, OutlookSoft, Polyserve, Red Hat, RightNow Technologies, Success Factors, Sun Edison, Tellabs, Trilogy and Wily Technology.
Current Greylock portfolio companies include Cloudera, Data Robotics, Digg, Facebook, Imperva, LinkedIn, Palo Alto Networks, Pandora, Picarro, Redfin, Workday and ZipCar. Greylock operates in a number of global centers of innovation, including Boston, China (Beijing), India (Bangalore), Israel (Herzliya) and Silicon Valley. For more information about Greylock Partners, visitwww.greylock.com or follow on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/greylock or Twitter (@GreylockVC).
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