STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN — (Marketwired) — 06/13/13 — Wrapp, the social gifting app that lets you use your smartphone to send free and paid digital gift cards to friends and family, today announced it has raised $15 million in Series B funding. The round includes investments and continued support by Series A investors Greylock Partners, Atomico and Creandum, as well as new investors Qualcomm Ventures, American Express, and SEB Private Equity, managing third party client capital at the Nordic financial services group SEB.
For consumers, Wrapp is the easiest way to give, receive and redeem free and paid digital using mobile devices or the Web, and makes group gifting a snap. For retailers and big brands, Wrapp is a friend-to-friend marketing platform for targeted, performance-based customer acquisition and retention campaigns.
“Wrapp has demonstrated real success with big retailers and momentum with consumers in the past 12 months,” said Reid Hoffman, general partner at Greylock and Wrapp board member. “Wrapp-s friend-to-friend marketing platform is unique, and seriously valuable to both merchants and consumers. Mobile will transform the shopping experience and will be key to customer engagement. Wrapp offers the best way to create with a measureable increase on sales.”
Added Niklas Zennström, general partner at Atomico and Wrapp board member: “Wrapp is targeting a huge market using social networks and smartphones — two massive shifts that are changing forever how we communicate, shop and celebrate the people we care about — and it-s getting bigger every day. I believe the next 12 months will be a break-out period for Wrapp and its friend-to-friend marketing platform.”
Wrapp will use the Series B funds to continue expansion, including hiring staff for its U.S. operations in San Francisco.
During the past six months, Wrapp has focused on improving its app and operational performance, and enjoyed rapid growth of new retail partners, new users, and digital gift cards given, received and redeemed.
Since the company began service in Sweden in November 2011 and expanded to the U.S. in May last year, consumers have used Wrapp-s iPhone and Android apps to give people in their social graph nearly 15 million digital gift cards.
More than 200 national and multinational retailers now use Wrapp-s platform to drive online consumers into offline, physical stores in the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Finland, Norway and Australia.
“Before Wrapp, very little money was going into giving brick-and-mortar merchants the kind of consumer activation and loyalty tools that are now commonplace for ecommerce sites,” said Johan Brenner, general partner at Creandum, the Nordic venture capital firm that provided Wrapp-s seed funding. “It was clear to us from the start that Wrapp-s friend-to-friend marketing platform would be game-changer and it-s totally living up to that expectation.”
Added Hjalmar Winbladh, Wrapp cofounder and CEO: “In almost two years of operation, we-ve learned that people who love shopping, love getting for themselves just as much as they love giving gifts. Over the coming year we-re confident social shopping will become a highly targeted and personal media channel connecting consumers with brands they love, and we want to become the default destination for that.”
To start sending free and paid gift cards to friends and family, download the Wrapp mobile app from Apple-s App Store or Google Play, or use Wrapp-s web app at .
Wrapp is a social gifting app that connects friends with retailers and brands they love. For consumers, Wrapp is the easiest way to give, receive and redeem free and paid gift cards using mobile devices or the Web, and makes group gifting a snap. For retailers and brands, Wrapp is a friend-to-friend marketing platform for targeted, performance-based customer acquisition and retention campaigns. Founded in 2011, Wrapp is based in San Francisco and Stockholm. Make gift giving a rewarding experience at .
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Greg Spector
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Lisa Rytter
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