Original post by Ki Mae Heussner via GIGAOM
Tech-savvy shoppers who look to their friends for purchasing inspiration, can already turn to platforms like Pinterest, Fancy, Fab and plenty of others. But with a Flipboard-like app for the iPad that aggregates social activity across shopping sites, New York-based Pickie believes it can get in on the social commerce action, too.
The startup, which is a recent graduate of TechStars New York, is announcing on Monday that it is launching in Apple’s App store with $1 million in seed funding.
The round was led by DFJ Gotham, and included Betaworks, Liberty City Ventures, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and MESA+. It also included several angel investors, such as Buzzfeed president and COO Jon Steinberg, TechStars New York’s former managing director David Tisch, SessionM CEO and co-founder Lars Albright, Highland Capital Partners’ Andy Miller and Epsilon EVP Eric Stein.
We first covered Pickie back in June, when it was still in beta but already an interesting entrant into the growing social commerce space. Recognizing that more startups and established companies would marry social features with e-commerce, Pickie’s pitch was that consumers would want one destination that would filter through all of the social recommendations and highlight the most interesting and relevant items. In addition to showcasing the products at the center of social activity, Pickie layers in original content, as well as eventually more content from publishers, to give it an editorial identity.
“Long-term, the plan is to build out content and make it feel more like a magazine than a catalog,” said co-founder and CEO Sonia Sahney Nagar.
