APPRL, the Stockholm-based startup that connects style influencers and premium media with brands and retailers in the fashion & lifestyle segments, is growing 25% month over month and has just closed a $1.4M round of funding led by Spintop Ventures. The financing will be used for product development to enable high quality influencer marketing at scale for brands and retailers, as well as expansion into new markets.
“APPRL has developed a product that solves some of the big challenges that brands, retailers, influencers & media houses are now facing because of the rapid transformation of digital media – from traditional advertising to more content- and influencer-driven marketing. We enable new revenue streams for influencers & digital magazines by making it super simple to create great shoppable content in just minutes. For brands & retailers we offer a solution that gets products promoted by top influencers & premium lifestyle media that and really delivers results. We’ve been able to position ourselves as the high quality network in the Nordics, with partners such as ELLE, Metro Mode, Sofi Fahrman, Carolines Mode, Isabella Löwengrip, Net-a-Porter, Filippa K, Royal Design and Gina Tricot, and will now be focusing on meeting the international demand for our product.”
– Gustav Gisseldahl, Cofounder & Head of Business Development
“We want to create a new standard for digital marketing, we’ve already become the main marketing channel for several of the brands we’re working with. Up until now, we’ve created the basic version of APPRL, but when looking ahead we see huge room for innovation within the space. For example we’ll start making better use of our data to help retailers, brands & media to better understand their audiences, which content that works best, how they should develop their products and much more – we have an exciting time ahead of us!”
– Martin Landén, Cofounder & CEO
All of the current angel investors are participating in the financing round, amongst them Jonas Meerits (ex CEO J.Lindeberg, chairman Happy Socks) who now becomes the Chairman of APPRL. Also, Mats Johansson, partner and digital media expert at Spintop Ventures, will join the founders on the board.
“Influencer marketing represents one of the most promising opportunities within the digital marketing landscape. A company that offers a scalable and long term defensible model by providing tangible value to influencers, their followers and brands will ride an interesting growth wave. Spintop is impressed with Martin and Gustav having already put APPRL on that crest, and I am looking forward to joining the board!”
– Mats Johansson, Partner at Spintop Ventures
Among the group of new investors are also people such as Magnus Sandberg (ex Tech Lead at Google), Patric Blixt (ex. VP Marketing Klarna, CMO Pricerunner and Rebtel), Ludvig Linge (ex. CEO & founder TAT), Jonas Sjögren (ex. CEO SBS Discovery Nordic), Johan Kleberg (CEO Adlibrisgruppen), Fredrik Tilander (Backstage Invest) and more.
“I invest in small but skilled tech teams. APPRL connects online media and e-commerce in an elegant, transparent and scalable way, with what I believe is perfect market timing.”
– Magnus Sandström, Investor and former Tech Lead at Google
Contact:
Martin Landén, CEO martin@apprl.com , +46 76-540 8080
Gustav Gisseldahl, Head of Business Development, gustav@apprl.com , +46 70-837 4476
About APPRL:
APPRL’s award-winning product makes it super simple for the top influencers and premium media within the fashion and lifestyle segments to create different types of shoppable content, for example different types of shops, photos tagged with products and other formats, with products from the world’s best online stores. For brands & retailers, APPRL offers a marketing channel with 20-40x higher effect than traditional display advertising. APPRL enables influencer marketing at scale, as an integrated, bridging infrastructure between influencers & brands/retailers.
APPRL was founded in 2012 by Martin Landén and Gustav Gisseldahl.