Spare5 operates a mobile-focused crowdsourcing marketplace that lets businesses outsource menial data tasks to smartphone users. The platform assigns tasks based on users’ skills and hobbies after an onboarding survey and Facebook connection for quality control. Spare5 aggregates answers using proprietary quality algorithms and published best practices to deliver results to business customers. The company says about 90% of its users are in the U.S., with a roughly even male/female ratio and most users under 30. Spare5 declined to disclose typical earnings but noted community members have made several hundred dollars and emphasized it is not a job. It will use the new funding to expand engineering, design, marketing, community management, and customer-relationship capabilities. Spare5 is a mobile-optimized, on-demand insights platform spun out of Madrona Venture Labs that pays people to provide expert insights in their spare time. The company indexes app users on dozens of criteria and sends paid projects to people based on their experience, hobbies and the quality of their responses. Spare5 is initially focused on helping ecommerce companies increase sales through expert image tagging and data clean up. Led by CEO and co-founder Matt Bencke with co-founders Patrick O’Donnell, Daryn Nakhuda and Matt Shobe, the team matches the right experts to a given task. Financially, Spare5 raised $3.25M in seed financing. Madrona Venture Group Managing Director Greg Gottesman and Foundry’s Brad Feld will join the Spare5 board in conjunction with the funding.

Total raised

$13M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Aug 2015