Curalate offers a suite of visual-commerce tools that use image recognition to tag products in social and on-site images and link them to purchase pages. Its product set includes Like2Buy, Fanreel, Visual Insights, Reveal and Ads, bundled as a monthly SaaS subscription. The platform lets brands surface products from Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and other networks, generate analytics on visually trending items, and buy social ads with proprietary targeting. Since 2011 Curalate has assembled a roster of major retail and media clients including Refinery29, Nasty Gal, Gap, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Sephora, Urban Outfitters, J.Crew, True Religion and BuzzFeed. Co-founder and CEO Apu Gupta led a pivot from an earlier Y Combinator project to build the current company. The startup positions itself to help brands harness user-shot photos and influencer-driven demand while acknowledging competitive risk from more specialized tools. Curalate provides a comprehensive platform for marketing with images, combining advanced image‑analytics algorithms and marketing tools to track visual conversations and identify trends. Its platform supports engagement and commerce across Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook. The company serves roughly 400 of the world’s leading brands, including Gap, Neiman Marcus, Campbell’s, Swarovski, Under Armour, Better Homes & Gardens and Michaels. Curalate has been selected for Tumblr’s A‑List and joined the alpha of Pinterest’s MarTech initiative with access to the Pinterest Business Insights API, reflecting deep partnerships with major visual platforms. The company plans to use new funding to accelerate hiring, marketing and product development. Recent financing brought its total funding to $12.5 million. Curalate is a Pinterest analytics and marketing platform that uses advanced image recognition algorithms to enable brands to measure, monitor and grow brand engagement on visual social media sites such as Pinterest. The company was co-founded by Apu Gupta (CEO) and Nick Shiftan (CT0) and is used by brands and agencies across sectors including consumer packaged goods, retail, publishing, luxury, automotive and media. Curalate is based in New York City and Philadelphia, PA. It plans to use the $3M Series A to expand product development and marketing and to extend to platforms beyond Pinterest, such as Instagram, which the company said would be announced in the coming weeks. The Series A was led by NEA with participation from First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures, following a $750k seed round from the same three investors. In conjunction with the funding, Patrick Chung of NEA and Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital joined Curalate’s board of directors. Curalate offers a visual analytics and marketing service that lets brands search for and track their images across Pinterest, including both brand-posted and consumer-posted content. Its proprietary solutions, based on visual-search techniques, map how pieces of visual content move through Pinterest and potentially lead to conversions on e-commerce sites. The company launched officially after a beta that picked up more than 150 brand customers in two months, including Birchbox, Bonobos, Kraft, Neiman Marcus and Warby Parker. Pricing is offered in three tiers—$19/month, $49/month and $99/month—for varying levels of service and tracking. While Pinterest is the initial focus, Curalate plans to extend its tracking to other image-centric networks such as Polyvore, Fancy, Wanelo and Instagram. Apu Gupta is co-founder and CEO.

Total raised

$40M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Feb 2016