Barcode scanning and product search app ShopSavvy has raised $7 million in new funding led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin with Brad Martin (Former CEO of retailer Saks Fifth Avenue), James Bailey, and participating. This brings the company’s total funding to $9 million.
ShopSavvy is a mobile app that allows you to scan in a barcode, do a product lookup and find comprable deals on products nearby or online. Here’s how it works. Using the phone’s camera and the app, you point your phone’s camera at any barcode and it will read it, do a product look up, and give you information about the product, as well as where you can find it online or at nearby stores and for how much.
Since launching in 2008, ShopSavvy has over 10 million current unique users and counts over 40,000 partnerships with retailers, including Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Sears, Nordstrom and Barnes & Noble. The company’s technology brings real-time pricing and product information directly into a consumer’s hands.
The app, which available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and Nokia phones, has seen 20 million downloads to date, says the company’s co-founder Alexander Muse. By way of history, ShopSavvy was one of the best early Android applications. It launched in October of 2008 after winning one of the initial Google Android Developer Challenge top prizes (back then, it was still known as GoCart).
ShopSavvy boasts 50 million product scans a month and also includes “Deals” function takes into account a shopper’s location, shopping history, and preferences when serving up most offers. Last year, the company acquired Snappr.
“Much like the nascent days of social media, I believe the mobile shopping services market is in the very early stages of change,” said Saverin. “In my opinion, ShopSavvy has the right connections, the right partners and the right technology to be a game-changer.”
The company has also built an impressive business of licensing scanning technology data to over 200 companies including Pricegrabber, The New York Times, Cnet, Consumer Reports, and Walmart.
Of course, product search and barcode scanning is a huge market and ShopSavvy faces competition from the likes of eBay (via RedLaser) and Amazon. But Muse isn’t afraid to take these e-commerce giants on and believes that the company’s technology has been able to gain a loyal (and quite large) group of user.
There’s no doubt that ShopSavvy is playing in a space that is expected to only grow by leaps and bounds According to Forrester Research, mobile commerce is expected to reach $31 billion by 2016, up from $3 billion in 2010. Clearly, a large part of m-commerce will be product scanning and purchasing on the fly. And ShopSavvy wants to be the go-to app for this.