Visual commerce platform Photoslurp receives €750K in investment
Barcelona, November 2017 – Photoslurp, the leading visual commerce platform in Europe, just received an investment of €750.000. Inveready Technology Investment Group, a leading VC in Spain, led the Photoslurp investment with participation from Bankinter VC (through the Entrepreneurship Programme of Bankinter’s Innovation Foundation), Caixa Capital Risc and ICF. This is Photoslurp’s first investment, since the company was co-founded in 2014 by Ben Heinkel and Eulogi Bordas, having been completely bootstrapped to this point.
>From the beginning, Photoslurp has been enabling brands to engage with their customers while increasing their conversion rates by incorporating customers photos and videos in their websites as shoppable social proof. Growing rapidly, Photoslurp is now the market leader in Europe working with over 150 brands in 20 countries. Links of London, Folli Follie, Tally Weijl, Cluse Watches, Adolfo Domínguez and Lindblad Expeditions are some of their flagship clients.
Visual Commerce Platform
Photoslurp’s visual commerce platform allows brands to leverage User Generated Content (UGC) created by their fans and customers. The platform scans social media for photos and videos of customers with a brand’s’ products and integrates them into the brand’s online store. By directly linking this media to products, they become shoppable and lead to increased conversion rates.
As a result, brands benefit from the use of this media by creating an engaging community feeling on their website, while enriching product pages with inspiring real-life social content and boosting their e-commerce conversion rate in the process.
Photoslurp’s extensive analytics suite allows brands to measure real-time the impact of UGC in their online stores as well as provides key ROI metrics. The best performing photos or videos are identified and can then be pushed to Facebook and Instagram to create high performing advertisements. In addition, the suite helps to identify and monitor brand evangelists across social media networks, enabling brands to further engage with them.
Scaling up the business
The investment enables Photoslurp to fully grab the momentum of visual commerce, by scaling up European growth and continuously increasing the added value for their clients by enhancing their technology. “Visual commerce is becoming more important by the day”, says Eulogi Bordas, CEO of Photoslurp.”With the diminishing results of online advertising, UGC is extremely important for both building a community and engaging with your audience, reinforcing consumer trust, driving traffic and increasing your ecommerce conversion rate. Brands embracing photos and videos of customers have experienced significant ROI increases and we foresee that – in addition to fashion, beauty and travel brands – UGC will become indispensable for many brands from other industries as well.”
“The growth that Photoslurp managed to obtain without funding, the technical level of the visual commerce platform combined with its strong leadership team more than validates the investment”, explains Roger Piqué, Founding Partner of Inveready Technology Group. “We believe the importance of brand engagement and UGC will continue to surge, making it a key component in digital marketing campaigns. Therefore we are excited to be a partner in the scaling of Photoslurp as a leading company of the future.
THE MARKETPLACE FOR TATTOOS, TATTOODO, CLOSES INVESTMENT ROUND AT $5M
Tattoodo is a Copenhagen-based startup with the aim to become a profitable marketplace for tattoos. They recently closed their investment round at DKK31M (around $4,9M).
Tattoodo was founded in 2013 by the serial entrepreneurs Mik Thobo-Carlsen and Johan Plenge. The platform covers all aspects of tattoo culture and it even lets users request tattoos. Tattoo artists can receive immediate feedback on the sketches they submit on the platform.
Tattoodo has today 20M users every month and 346K uploaded tattoos to choose between.
Second investment in one year
The investment was provided by both new and existing shareholders, including Christian Stadil, Daniel Agger, Jan Bech Andersen, Bjarke Ingels, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and venture capital fund Nordic Eye.
In December 2016 Tattoodo closed an investment round at $8,5M to expand to the American market. The company still struggles to become profitable, with losses at DKK 17,6M ($2,8M) in 2016.
Latvia’s Droneplan creates drones for risky industrial inspections
Industrial inspections are a risky job. To inspect overhead power lines, for example, a person usually has to climb up a high tension wire, deal with wind and weather conditions, and on top of that, perform a detailed inspection. Droneplan, a startup based in Latvia, is creating intelligent flight planning software to enable drones to perform autonomous inspection.
Droneplan started as a hobby for founder Viktors Bikovs, who became interested in autonomous flight systems for drones as a student. “I made my master’s thesis about this idea, and then I moved it into the next level and started to commercialize it,” he explains. The company was officially founded in June 2016, and since then the team of 5 has reached a piloting stage and begun doing inspections for initial customers.
Droneplan now consists of a 3-part software: Intelligent flight planning software, comprehensive technology enables companies to plan, create, and analyze all forms of aerial data within an enterprise workflow
After an inspection, of for example, a power line is performed, the data is uploaded into the cloud, and machine learning algorithms help the user generate reports about any issues.
“Traditional inspections take about 3 hours, but in our case we can do a full inspection in around 4 minutes,” says Viktors.
Droneplan also reduces CO2 emissions, as many inspections traditionally must use expensive equipment like helicopters. “In comparison to traditional equipment, we are a green inspection service,” says Viktors.
Droneplan plans to expand into the Norway and Finland, as well as diversify their products with applications especially for wind farms and telecommunication towers. They recently showcased their products in Norway at Oslo Innovation Week, one of the most important startup events in the Nordics.