Wedding planning marketplace Loverly has now officially announced a raise of $3.5 million in Series A funding. We reported that talks were in the $2.5 million range last April. It has since added more investors, bumping it up another million.
Montage Ventures takes the lead on this round, with participation from Female Founders Fund, Softbank Capital, Comcast Ventures, Great Oak Capital and angel investors Joanne Wilson, Sonja Perkins, and Leslie Blodgett (founder of BareMinerals).
Note that Loverly hired Peggy Fry, Loverly’s new COO and President, this July and that Wilson joined the Loverly board at that time. Fry met Kellee through the Female Founders Network.
The Pinterest-style bridal startup raised a total of nearly $1.5 in a few smaller rounds prior to this, putting the total amount of funding at $5 million when the deal is officially done.
Loverly’s most recent stats put it at 135,000 combined downloads for its iOS and Android apps, up from 90,000 downloads reported in April. The latest results also report the site gets 40 million image views and 1.7 million uniques per month.
Loverly plans to use the new cash to build out the company and handle the growth it’s experienced in the last year. The “Real Weddings” feature, added this last spring, helped contribute to that growth. It adds in bundled photos of users wedding photos and ideas in order to inspire others.
Loverly has incorporated a bunch of smaller updates over these past few months. It just announced a smarter search capability with the sections Category, Color and Event Details. Click on Event Details and then select a backyard venue with a chevron accent in the fall and the search will pull up wedding plans that include all of that, combined into a neat little package.
While the site already helps brides and wedding planners put together ideas and shop for wedding materials, this new search capability uses Loverly’s proprietary data to serve up products and ideas it guesses a bride or groom may want. The new “Guided Search” will exist within a banner at the top and the tool will be featured on three of the site’s main pages; “Shop,” “Galleries” and “Real Weddings.”
“For the bride who has a good idea of what she wants, our new ‘mad lib’ [sic] section introduces elements she may not have yet thought of,” explains Khalil. “And for the bride who is new to the wedding world, our clean, delightful design eases her in while showcasing the terms she should start to become familiar with.”