Kyle
Our good friend Brandi Wimberly and her group buying startup, Buyvite, have just finished closing a funding round. This unique startup makes creating makeshift buying groups easy to do and easy to collect.
No we aren’t talking about some crazy Groupon, group buying platform, we’re talking a much more practical use. Picture you and your cousins, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters are all putting their money together to buy grandma and grandpa an anniversary cruise. You know how this traditionally goes, one coordinator puts their money on the line for the entire trip and all of a sudden everyone has a problem making the payment.
ANother great example is say you and your college buddies decide to take a group trip to a baseball game. Same thing, one person is holding the bag. No longer, not with BuyVite.
Buyvite lets you pull money together for one thing, it makes collecting the money a cinch and then one administrator can take the collected money for the group purchase. Pretty smart huh?
That’s what the investors must have thought because Wimberly reports that she has closed a funding round and plans to expand Buyvite’s markets infrastructure, mobile platform and management team.
“Now that we have successfully closed this round of financing, we can aggressively and confidently pursue retail partners who are interested and willing to participate in this socially relevant and expanding piece of the marketplace in which to further drive their products and services to and through. Buyvite is a new and exciting way to capture this evolving and growing segment of the social payments audience and we are extremely confident that the retail community will seize and embrace this new opportunity. We’re also excited to be approaching some new high growth market opportunities that have so far been largely ignored by the social commerce space.” Wimberly said in a statement.
“Our recent investment will also allow us to add new functionality and pivot our product to more closely align with consumer and retailer feedback and feature requests. Our investors and advisors are very focused on retail business development and brand building but also respect the technology we are crafting and overall product execution. Among our investors and advisors are experienced business leaders with a wide range of talents that can help us achieve our goal of being the leading group payment platform for retailers. We are lucky to have such an amazing group of people helping to build this company.” Wimberly added.
Buyvite also announced the addition of Bob Mallo and Brad Bialas to the management team. Mallo will assist in strategic formation, operational direction and company wide execution. Most recently Mallo was the Group President of Follett Educational Distribution Group and President of Follett Educational Services prior to that. Bialas will help develop sales, marketing, and pricing models as well as strategic partners. Bialas has been in the payments space for 12 years, most recently as the President of BluePay (a large payment processing software provider) where he helped the company grow from 3 employees and nominal revenue to over $100MM in annual sales. Buyvite Advisors include Vijay Raghavendra of IBM, Balaji Gopinath of Turner Broadcasting and Media Camp, Jacob Tell of Oniracom and Poornima Vijayashanker of Bizeebee Software.
This undisclosed funding round was led by Rocket Ventures.
Linkage:
Check out Buyvite here
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