Posse

About

Posse is a web and mobile local-discovery app where users create and share curated playlists of shops and restaurants, using hand-drawn visuals and a merchant dashboard for nominations and outreach.

Mission

Posse launched in 2012 as a customer recommendation app where users create and share virtual streets of favourite places to eat, drink and shop. The platform reports a network of about 50,000 shops and 110,000 shoppers and organic growth of roughly 18% per month. The app first went live in March 2013 and the team says engagement is increasing after a period of product refinement without paid marketing. Posse is pursuing partnerships with retail tech startups and has negotiated a rollout with Mi9, while also investigating additional services to offer merchants and shoppers. The company plans to use the latest funding to accelerate growth and market the platform more aggressively. Posse is a local discovery platform (web and mobile) that lets users build and share curated lists—called ""playlists"" or virtual ""streets""—of favorite shops, restaurants, bars, clubs and other businesses. The product uses hand-drawn visual representations for businesses, builds its own places database, and pulls merchant logos/photos or leverages Google Street View to match store templates. Merchants get a dashboard to see who nominated them, view wishlists and reach out to prospective customers; during private beta 17,000 shops signed up, including about 4,000 in the U.S., primarily in New York and San Francisco. Posse plans a paid merchant pricing model (first five customers free, then $50 or $100 per month) and intends to launch an advertising platform in April to let businesses target friends of their customers. The company launched in Sydney and is in the process of moving to New York; its iOS app is live and an Android version is forthcoming. Financially, Posse has raised over $3.5 million to date and is closing the remainder of a $1.5 million second seed round. Posse is a Sydney start-up that has overhauled its offering and relaunched as a retail-focused app. The company originally launched in 2010 and was previously built around the music industry, giving bands a platform to reward dedicated fans who promoted shows via social media. That model has been completely changed and a new iteration of Posse will be officially unveiled next week. To support the pivot Posse raised a further $1.2 million from a mix of US and Australian investors. The round was led by Silicon Valley angel investor Bill Tai and included backers such as Bill Lee, Simon Rothman and Australian fund Elevation Capital among a total of 11 investors.

Quick Facts