Fancy, the shoppable rival to Pinterest, is said to have raised $53 million from investors, bringing the company valuation to $600 million, Bloomberg reported this morning.
The July 3 SEC filing disclosing the funding round did not name the full roster of investors. A Bloomberg source “familiar with the matter” said the backers include American Express, Len Blavatnik, and Will Smith. AmEx President Edward Gilligan, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Kering chairman Francois-Henri Pinault, and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes are listed on the filing.
COO Michael Silverman declined to comment to TechCrunch on how the company will be putting this investment to use, but it could have something to do with the announcement last month that Fancy would begin shipping worldwide. The international expansion was the result of demand from non-US users, who account for just under half of all users, Silverman told TechCrunch last month.
As we pointed out, Fancy does face tough competition in the U.S. from sites like Polyvore and Wanelo, which rank well above it on the iPhone app store. Moving internationally could lower the field of competitors.
Often compared to Pinterest for its image sharing format, Fancy has been working on the idea of social commerce since it enabled users to shop the products in the images directly on the site in February.
Another, presumably smaller part of the Fancy business model is sample subscriptions. The company started selling its Birchbox-like “Fancy Boxes” in September 2012 and acquired the artisinal food subscription service Samplrs in February. Fancy could be looking to expand this further, but it seems secondary to the international commerce move at this point.
Fancy told TechCrunch this morning that they are now seeing about $100,000 per day in sales. They are also claiming nearly 8 million registered users and over 12 million unique visitors across all platforms last month.
We’ll be watching to see where these numbers go in the months following Fancy’s internationalization, especially if this latest investment round has anything to do with it.