Social gifting app, Wrapp, recently announced receiving $15 million in Series B funding supported by Series A investors such as Greylock Partners, Atomico and Creandum. Other investors such as Qualcomm Ventures, American Express and SEB Private Equity also participated in the round. The San Francisco and Stockholm, Sweden-based app will use the funding to continue expansion, including hiring staff for its U.S. operations.
“Wrapp has demonstrated real success with big retailers and momentum with consumers in the past 12 month,” said Reid Hoffman, general partner at Greylock and Wrapp board member. “Wrapp’s friend-to-friend marketing platform is unique, and seriously valuable to both merchants and consumers. Mobile will transform the shopping experience and will be key to consumer engagement. Wrapp offers the best way to create branded word of mouth with a measurable increase on sales.”
Founded in 2011, Wrapp has been connecting friends with retailers and brands they love. Wrapp allows users to easily send free and paid digital gift cards to friends and family through their smartphones or the web. Consumers have distributed nearly 15 million digital gift cards through Wrapp’s iPhone and Android apps.
“Wrapp is targeting a huge market using social networks and smartphones – two massive shifts that are changing forever how we communicate, shop and celebrate the people we care about – and it’s getting bigger everyday,” said Niklas Zennstrom, general partner at Atomico and Wrapp board member. “I believe that the next 12 month will be a break-out period for Wrapp and its friend-to friend marketing platform.”
During the past six months, Wrapp has focused on improving its app and operational performance, and enjoyed rapid growth of new retails partners, new users, and digital gift cards given, received and redeemed.
“Before Wrapp, very little money was going into giving brick-and-mortar merchants the kind of consumer activation and loyalty tools that are now commonplace for e-commerce sites,” said Johan Brenner, general partner at Creandum. “It was clear to us from the start that Wrapp’s friend-to-friend marketing platform would be game-changer and it’s totally living up to that expectation.”
Over 200 national and multinational retailers now use Wrapp’s friend-to-friend marketing platform to drive online customers into offline, physical stores in the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Finland, Norway and Australia.
“In almost two years of operation, we’ve learned that people who love shopping, love getting exclusive promotions for themselves just as much as they love giving gifts,” said Hjalmar Winbladh, Wrapp co-founder and CEO. “Over the coming year we’re confident social shopping will become a highly targeted and personal media channel connecting consumers with brands they love, and we want to become the default destination for that.”
By Pia Talwar