Prive, a San Francisco-based start-up that allows brands to set up sustainable recurring revenue in minutes and provides shoppers the most seamless purchase and management experience available has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding. With the funds, it aims to create a better customizable e-commerce subscriptions platform for D2C brands.
This investment round was co-led by Patrick Chung and Brandon Farwell at XFund and Ben Ling from Bling Capital, with participation from Defy Partners, Halogen Ventures, and Uber executives.
The company offers easily configurable subscriptions (such as the ability to enable variable cadences, product swaps, and offers), alongside personalized incentives and actionable analytics to
empower D2C businesses to build subscriptions that retain demand without one-size-fits-some rigidity. The company was founded by Claudia Laurie and Alex Craciun. They both had spent two-and-a-half years at Uber and decided on the basis of their learnings about pricing and incentives, to leave the company earlier this year. this gave birth to Prive which is now a month old and aims to better enable small retailers to compete with e-commerce giants like Amazon.
The broad idea is that by plugging into existing APIs from Shopify and other e-commerce platforms, Prive can form an opinion that it sells to merchants about what customers tend to buy on a repetitive basis.
However, the company is just in a pre-seed stage and consists of 7 team members with challenging competition.
“E-commerce ‘subscription’ is an incredibly hot buzzword,” Craciun acknowledges. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for a vast improvement in the tools that are being offered to retailers, he suggests, and clearly, investors are willing to gamble that he’s right. “Current tools can create more headaches than they actually solve,” says Craciun. “There is a lot of rigidity in today’s subscriptions making it very difficult to identify the right recurring mix of offerings. We’re here to break down that mental model.”
