The Hunt is a community-driven online shopping platform that makes photos shoppable, connecting visual content to e-commerce purchases. Founded in 2011 and launched in January 2013, the company combines the visual web with purchase intent to help users find and buy items shown in photos. The product is used by a sizable audience, with over half a million monthly active users and roughly 100,000 daily active mobile users. The company plans to use the new funding to hire additional staff to grow its product and community. After the latest round, The Hunt has raised a total of $15.5m. The Hunt operates a community-driven fashion site and iOS app that lets users post "hunts"—photos of unidentified clothing from sources like Tumblr and Pinterest—and have other users identify exact items or suggest similar products. Since launching in January, the service is driving roughly 200,000 hunts per week, double the volume from two months prior. Mobile already accounts for 50% of traffic (85% of that from smartphones, largely iPhones, and 15% from tablets), which motivated the release of its first iPhone app and plans to mobile-optimize the website. The company monetizes via an affiliate model for purchases driven from community suggestions; conversion of outbound clicks to purchases is reported at about 1.5–1.75%. Product roadmap items over the next six months include more robust personalization that surfaces relevant hunts as a feed and expanded tagging that surfaces related tags in the app. The Hunt also provides brands with data on user activity and sees interest from ecommerce sites looking to engage its intent-rich user base. The Hunt operates a community-driven platform where users post “hunts” to find items to purchase online, and other users identify matching products. The site reports over 300,000 registered users and 250,000 products added to submitted hunts; 75% of hunts are marked “found,” driven largely by a 15% core of users who help others. CEO Tim Weingarten says the service aims to improve functionality and user engagement, with new developments expected in the next few months. The company views its hunts as monetizable because users come with intent to find and purchase, creating opportunities for brands and e-commerce sites to supply product options. The Hunt positions itself against discovery competitors like Pinterest, Polyvore, Fancy, and Wanelo, while building support from celebrity users and investors. The Hunt connects images from social sites and the web to products users can buy by letting members post photos or import likes and start a “Hunt.” Users specify requests like “similar to this,” “this look for less,” “what goes with this,” or “this exactly,” plus max spend and categories; an active community of fashion-focused users then solves the hunts. Around 20% of the user base solves hunts, and engagement tools include a “gem” button and a “Perfect” marker for solved hunts. The site reports over 200,000 members (up from 65,000 pre-launch), adding about 50,000 new members each week, with users spending roughly 25 minutes per session and about 1 million monthly uniques. Members have found over 200,000 products (previously 115,000) and earlier activity produced roughly 250,000 e-commerce referrals; clicks from The Hunt convert to purchases at about 1.5–2%. The company plans to expand beyond women’s fashion into decor, beauty, and men’s fashion, grow its nine-person team with additional iOS and web engineers, and ship an iPhone app this quarter. The Hunt is a community-driven shopping platform that helps users find and purchase items seen in photos on Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr and other photo networks. Users can upload photos or import likes/posts and "start a hunt" by adding characteristics to help others find the exact item or similar products. A community of fashion-focused members collaboratively solves hunts, follows hunts, likes recommendations, and can add suggested complementary products. Prior to the site's official launch the company generated more than 65,000 active members who spent an average of 24 minutes per day, and unique visitors in December crossed 615,000. In six months members located 115,000 products from over 10,000 unique stores and in December alone generated over 250,000 referrals to e-commerce sites with conversion rates five to ten times higher than other social/web traffic sources. The team includes co-founders Tim Weingarten (former VC) and Simon Peck (formerly ran Quantcast's web team), with product and engineering hires from Quantcast and Zynga; the company has raised $2 million led by Javelin Venture Partners.

Total raised

$18M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Apr 2014