Sift, a mobile shopping service has closed USD 2 million in seed funding, the company announced today alongside its iPhone launch. The startup first came into the limelight a year as a way to leverage shopping data found in user's inboxes, which includes daily deals emails, retailer sales and promotions and turn them into a "shoppable" experience on the iPad. Since then, Sift has expanded way beyond email data and is allowing users to shop products from roughly 3000 retailers. From its new mobile app, Sift is going to bring consumers through a social shopping feature called Shopping Circles.
Shopping Circles is a features wherein users can add close family and friends to the apps and thus receive instant recommendations about what those users might like. If their friends are also Sift users, those recommendations will then come from Sift's understanding of a user's taste based on its analysis of shopping patterns. If they're not users, it instead make suggestions based on what other people are buying for people like them.
The announcement of the USD 2 million funding round is in fact, a total raise to date which already includes an additional USD 1.5 million which was closed last week, led by DN Capital. The new funding also sees further participation from previous investors such as Tandem Capital, Unity Ventures, Sand Hill Angels (from its USD 540,000 angel round) and with new investors Social Internet Fund, Future Perfect Ventures, Grey Corp, the CEO of NQ Mobile, Omar Khan, and others.
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