Tapiture, the web's leading male-oriented social discovery site, has raised $825,000 in seed funding to advance its growth efforts. In Q4 of 2012, the site recorded 8.6 million visits by 4.1M unique visitors with engagement levels of close to seven minutes per visit. Tapiture generated 78 million page views during this same period and collectively bests all other direct competitors in traffic and engagement, combined.

Tapiture pairs a users' social and interest graphs to deliver highly relevant content including interesting images, funny videos and unique products via a visually compelling mosaic. Tapiture will also be adding retail buyers, or "Tastemakers," to their full-time team who will partner with merchants to curate products available directly for sale on Tapiture. Marketers may also host branded experiences to leverage the same community of engaged consumers. Ultimately, partners will reach a highly targeted and desirable audience of purchase-ready consumers while providing Tapiture with a monetization model. Funding will also allow Tapiture to expand its engineering team and further the development of Tapiture mobile apps.

Brothers John and Leo Resig of Resignation Media originally founded Tapiture when they sought to complement their profitable flagship destination, theCHIVE.com, with a social media component. After recognizing the platform's larger market potential, Resignation Media spun out Tapiture as a separate corporate entity and industry veteran, John Ellis, was hired to run the company. In the four months since his late September appointment as CEO, Ellis has raised a seed round, crystalized a monetization strategy, guided product expansion and led talent recruitment efforts.

"Tapiture is addressing an incredible opportunity to solve the top end problem of the sales funnel, the discovery process, by leveraging the social and interest graph of our engaged community of users," said Tapiture CEO, John Ellis. "Our seed funding will allow us to aggressively expand our platform that fuels the discovery of cool content and products and generates considerable income for Tapiture and its partners."

Funding was secured through private angel investors. The startup currently hosts seven employees in their Venice Beach office and expects to double their team by mid-year 2013. Tapiture also plans to grow their Board of Directors by two Board seats from independent directors.

"We're thrilled with Tapiture's early success and stand committed to supporting their effort in becoming the web's leading male-centric social discovery and sharing site," said Leo Resig, CEO of Resignation Media and Tapiture Board member. "Tapiture's ability to secure a healthy seed funding round is a resounding testament to the platform's market potential to introduce innovative and profitable e-commerce solutions. It's going to be an exciting year."