Toronto’s ShopLocket Gets $1M in Financing
Last fall, Katherine Hague wanted to sell some custom made t-shirts online. Setting up a traditional e-commerce site seemed too costly and time consuming but using an existing solution such as eBay or Craigslist did not meet her needs. Right then and there, ShopLocket was born!
ShopLocket lets you start selling items online in minutes. All you need is a product, along with a picture, its price, and a short description of the offering and you’re off to the races! Plus, it’s totally risk free – if you don’t sell anything, you don’t pay anything. By using ShopLocket, your product will be beautifully displayed and it can be embedded on any website, Facebook page, or blog post – as easily as a YouTube video is.
This past spring, ShopLocket participated in Centre for Commercialization of Research’s SmartStart Program in partnership with Extreme Startups. The program supports Ontario’s next generation of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematic entrepreneurs by facilitating training and development.
When the Shoplocket team presented during Extreme Startups’ demo day on June 19, 2012 they had already secured $500K – half of their goal for their seed round; guided by investor Rho Canada.
Recently, the company secured an additional $500K in co-led by Peter Thiel, of Valar Ventures, who was an original angel investor in Facebook. The accumulated funds closed the company’s first round of financing and will be used to grow ShopLocket’s marketing and development team.
Shoplocket just added a director of business development and a second developer to its team. They plan to add a designer and a third developer within the year.
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