Udorse, a New York-based startup currently in stealth, has raised a $500,000 round of seed funding from Founders Fund. Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel will be serving on the company’s board of directors.
At this point we know very little about the startup. It was founded by Trevor Austin and Geoffrey Lewis (pictured below), both of whom were previously employed at Thiel’s hedge fund Clarium Capital. The company plans to launch its service in private beta some time this summer. As for what it actually plans to do, Lewis provided us with the following (admittedly vague) description:
“We believe that recent trends are more than fads, and that they demand a
fundamentally new way for users to connect with brands across platforms.”
That’s not much to go on, but it sounds like Udorse will somehow play on the growing interaction between users and brands on Twitter and Facebook (given the name, users will probably be somehow endorsing their favorite brands). Whether or not Udorse is an entirely new service or one that builds on these existing platforms remains to be seen. We’ll be keeping an eye out for these guys over the next few months.
