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Venture Capital News: Tapiture Completes $2.25M Seed Funding

2014-02-12
VENICE, CA, Social curation and e-commerce platform for entertaining, inspiring, and aspirational content, announced today it has completed a $2.25 million seed round.
Tapiture, the social curation and e-commerce platform for entertaining, inspiring, and aspirational content, announced today it has completed a $2.25 million seed round from a prominent group of investors, including $1.25 million of new capital following a $1 million convertible note that was raised early last year. Led by JUMP Investors, which is managed by Randall Kaplan, Co-Founder of Akamai Technologies (AKAM), the round will be used to further Tapiture's growth and expand its network of merchant relationships.

'I am very impressed with Tapiture's vision, organic traction and impressive growth,' said Randall Kaplan. 'Their member community is heavily engaged and has already purchased over 50,000 products since Tapiture integrated e-commerce into the site less than a year ago. I'm excited about Tapiture's future, and look forward to working with the talented team and investors to build upon the company's recent success.'

As part of the investment, Kaplan joined Tapiture's Board of Directors. Additional investors participating in the round include Barry Sternlicht, Herb Simon, Brad Keywell / Lightbank, Brian Lee, Sam Bakhshandehpour, Dave Leyrer / Boulevard Capital, Happy Walters, Hilary Swank, Dwight Howard, and Amar'e Stoudemire.

Tapiture, which now reaches over 3 million monthly unique visitors and generates over 100 million monthly page views, is quickly becoming the place for modern tastemakers to browse, curate, and share the hottest entertaining content and products, ranging from humor to apparel, architecture, interior design, and photography.

'Tapiture's traffic and revenue growth proves that consumers are looking for a new avenue to discover and share unique content - whether related to personal style, art, design, travel, food, or entertainment,' said John Ellis, Tapiture's Chief Executive Officer. 'This infusion of new capital will allow our team to aggressively pursue our market and merchant expansion efforts as we shape the future of social commerce.'

Tapiture gives members an engaging platform to save images, videos, GIFs, and audio from their favorite websites into their Tapiture collections. With these items in their collections, members can share content with followers who have similar interests on the site or post on popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter. In addition to discovering socially shared content, members can also discover and buy curated products from Tapiture's merchant partners.

For a press gallery of images and assets, visit: http://www.tapiture.com/about/press.

About Tapiture

Tapiture is a visual discovery and e-commerce platform for entertaining, inspiring, and aspirational content. Tapiture enables anyone to save 'tapped' photos, videos, GIFs, and audio from their favorite websites into collections to share with the world. Tapiture also works with merchant partners to curate products, which are available for purchase directly on Tapiture. The platform leverages a user's social and interest graph to provide a highly relevant experience that is both entertaining and engaging. Tapiture is headquartered on the famous Venice Beach boardwalk and stands as a proud member of Silicon Beach's startup community. For more information, visit www.tapiture.com.
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