Hip eCommerce, the collectibles specific marketplaces and technology company, today announced a $5.325M Series A round of funding. Led by Next Coast Ventures, the current round brings total funding to date to just under $7M. Hip eCommerce will utilize the funding to augment business, marketing, product and engineering efforts, as well as to accelerate its product roadmap and continue to build revolutionary features for both buyers and sellers of collectibles.
Hip eCommerce builds marketplaces for specific collectibles, each built from the ground up to provide exceptional experiences and features. As eCommerce for collectibles remained stuck in the 1990s, with hundreds of billions in collectible sales remaining offline or unrealized each year, Hip eCommerce’s innovations specific to comic books, stamps and postcards have enabled online sales to be optimized and offline inventory and sales to be digitized.
“With the modern day renaissance we’re seeing in collectibles, the time is right to bring collecting into the 21st century and beyond,” said Hip eCommerce CEO Mark Rosenberg. “With this round, we’ve expanded our Board of Directors to include Mike Smerklo, David Kalt, the founder of Reverb.com, and Cotter Cunningham, the founder of RetailMeNot, who joins us as our new Executive Chair. With the team behind Next Coast Ventures, our current Director, Scot Wingo, and our new Board members, we have such a deep understanding of building marketplaces, that I honestly could not dream of better partners to move forward with and take Hip eCommerce to the next level.”
Launched in 2016, Hip eCommerce operates HipStamp.com, HipComic.com and HipPostcard.com, and today has over $18 Million in annualized GMV. Hip eCommerce is constantly innovating the collectibles markets, including with its launch earlier this year of Comic Book Image Recognition software, which allows Sellers to list comic books 4x faster, creating entire item listings, complete with Volume, Issue Number, and more from just a single image.
“Hip eCommerce fits squarely in our Reimagining Marketplaces and Retail Retold themes,” says Next Coast Ventures Co-Founder and Managing Director Michael Smerklo. “We see a potential to disrupt the large collectibles industry by bringing substantial offline inventory online to expand the market. Utilizing Mark’s deep domain expertise, the company is taking a vertical approach to niche collectible categories that have traditionally been underserved by larger horizontal marketplaces. With Next Coast Ventures’ Entrepreneurs Council member Cotter Cunningham joining the board and bringing a wealth of consumer Internet and marketing expertise, Mark and the team at Hip eCommerce are positioned for explosive growth. We are delighted to welcome Hip eCommerce to the Next Coast portfolio!”
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