Like a Charity:Water plus Kickstarter for everything, collaborative gifting startup Giftiki has raised just under one million in Series A financing, led by investor Tim Draper and including VC firms Crosslink Capital, GoldHill Capital and Transmedia Capital.
Elaborating on payment platforms like Venmo and Wepay, Giftiki lets users send small amounts of money as gifts, allowing recipients join a pool in order to gift their friends the more substantial things that they actually want, like the perfect Lanvin ballet slippers or a Frieda and Nellie bracelet, instead of individually buying less expensive (and less treasured) items from Forever 21, for example. I think this is an amazing idea.
Like Charity Water, Giftiki leverages social ties and game mechanics to get users to contribute to the gifting process and add more money to the pool (anyone who’s every felt the Charity Water peer pressure knows what I mean here). But the concept expands beyond birthdays to any gifting situation, holidays, graduations, fundraising and weddings and baby showers and it isn’t just for charitable causes. Woo hoo!
Says CEO Justin Stanislaw, “There was a big inefficiency in the gifting marketplace. People are receiving unwanted gifts and others don’t know what to buy someone. We wanted to solve the problem and create anengine for collaborative gifting, and in a sense collaborative social commerce.”
Brandery accelerator graduate Giftiki recently moved to San Francisco from Cincinnati and will be using its new funding to hire more engineers like everybody else. iOS and Android apps are currently in development and Giftiki plans on launching in alpha in the next couple of months.