SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SocialChat, the social commerce platform, today announced $6M in seed funding, led by Race Capital and Gradient Ventures with participation from Kevin Lin, co-founder of Twitch, Tony Zhao, founder of Agora.io, Ran Makavy, former Chief Product Officer at Lyft, Alanna Gregory, Global Head of Engagement at AfterPay, Jack Xie, VP of Engineering at Wish, and more. This funding will allow the platform to focus on expanding its product offerings .
One of the biggest pain points in eCommerce is converting social engagement to real revenue and user acquisition. SocialChat brings the brick-and-mortar retail experience to the digital realm, and gives consumers a personalized shopping experience with AI-powered product suggestions and recommendations. Consumers are able to purchase and transact during the events, driving live conversion for the brands.
While brands spend millions of dollars acquiring engagement on social media platforms, they remain in the dark about the users' personas. SocialChat enables brands to gain deep understanding of consumer shopping behaviors and empowers actionable insights powered by machine learning.
According to a recent market study published by Grand View Research, the global social commerce market size is expected to reach $3.4 trillion by 2028. It is anticipated to expand at a CAGR of 28.4% from 2021 to 2028.
“When I was Head of Growth at Wish, we would spend million of dollars hiring state-of-the-art machine learning engineers to convert social engagement into real revenue, the impact on gaining full control of our brand and owning our audience was mission critical.” said Frost Li, founder and CEO of SocialChat, “The idea of SocialChat was born knowing it is crucial not only for Wish, but for all eCommerce companies I advised. With SocialChat, I want to enable brands to have the same level of community engagement, audience ownership and revenue conversion without having to build out a massive engineering team and spending years on polishing the models.”
HTC selected SocialChat as the platform of choice to drive eCommerce engagement and revenue management. “I love that SocialChat can enable HTC to interact with our customers in real time.” said Cher Wang, Chairwoman and CEO of HTC Corporation.
“I believe Frost and her team will radically transform how social shopping will be done”, said Edith Yeung, Partner at Race Capital.“Her deep unique understanding in eCommerce, growth, Gen Z and Gen A behavior will make SocialChat the most powerful platform for the future of commerce.”
“COVID-19 has driven a huge growth in social shopping worldwide.” said Wen-Wen Lam, Partner at Gradient Ventures. “This is a golden opportunity for Social Chat to change the face of online shopping. Frost has successfully done this at Wish and Pinterest before and is well positioned to capture significant market share in a quickly evolving landscape”
For more information on SocialChat, visit https://onsocialchat.com/
About SocialChat
Socialchat is a real-time social shopping engagement platform that allows consumer brands to easily embed video shopping and interactive streaming experience for their customers anytime and anywhere. SocialChat empowers brands to take control of their customer data ownership and interaction while dramatically increasing conversion rates. For more information, please visit https://onsocialchat.com/
About Race Capital
Race Capital is an early stage venture fund focused on investing in exceptional founders who are building market-transforming companies in the data, enterprise, infrastructure, and fintech sectors. Our team invested in FTX, Databricks, Saber, Solana, Agora.io and many other great companies. For more information, visit https://race.capital/
About Gradient Ventures
Gradient Ventures is Google’s AI-focused venture fund - investing in and connecting early-stage startups with resources, innovation, and technical leadership in artificial intelligence. The fund focuses on helping founders navigate the challenges in developing new technology products, using the latest best-practices in recruiting, marketing, design, and engineering so that great ideas can come to life. Gradient was founded in 2017 and is based in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit www.gradient.com.
