The tech-first UK personalized beauty marketplace Sourcerie secured £1.8 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Playfair Capital and Vorwerk Ventures.
WHO: Sourcerie was founded by Kristin Cardwell and Alex Beyer and launched in February. The company is building a personalized shopping marketplace between consumers, retailers, and brands where consumers can access recommendations based on customer feedback and machine learning. Software is used to process hundreds of thousands of online consumer reviews to provide highly personalized product recommendations.
WHY: The funding will build the tech platform and personalization software for consumers’ skincare, haircare, and body care needs. Since closing the £1.8 million pre-seed round, they are hiring a team across engineering, product, commercial, and marketing.
IN THEIR OWN WORDS: "We were super impressed with the founding team’s background ranging from Palantir, Function of Beauty, L’Oréal, and Refinery29, to engineering degrees from MIT, Cambridge, and Oxford, plus extensive experience in tech, beauty and scaling venture-backed businesses," Jeevan Sunner, Principal at Playfair Capital, said of the investment. "Coupled with their passion for the space, we knew these are the founders to disrupt the status quo in beauty by helping consumers and suppliers apply objective, data-driven decision-making to their personal care needs."
“We want to enable a natural human behavior—seeking a recommendation—and use tech to scale that,” Cardwell told the Financial Times. “We work with both retailers and brands to integrate their products and reviews into our brand, and show a marketplace to the consumer. It’s a curation of reviews, not just products. What are people just like me saying about this product?”
“Beauty is a massive market but a tech laggard,” Beyer told Tech Funding News. “Making use of messy data is hard in any industry, but personalising for beauty has so much more nuance that can only be captured by scaling community input. The data platform and software we’re building has so many potential use cases for the broader industry. We’re already in discussions with many of our supplier partners about potential applications, from making data-driven buying decisions, to being their white label in-store recommender. Beauty and retail have historically struggled to attract engineering talent that can deliver on this, but it’s something that only we can deliver on with our expertise and platform.”
Katharina Neuhaus, Principal at Vorwerk Ventures, commented, “In a world in which customers are increasingly overwhelmed by choice and information, we couldn’t be more excited to support Alex and Kristin who are building a truly data driven approach to enable millions of people to find the most suitable products for them.”
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