Pre-Seed Funding for Personalised Shopping Marketplace

In the UK, personalised beauty shopping marketplace Sourcerie has raised £1.8m in a pre-seed round of funding, which it will use to continue to build its tech platform and personalisation software for consumer skin, hair and body care consumers and brands.

Founded by former L'Oreal exec Kristin Cardwell and former Palantir exec Alex Beyer, Sourcerie works with supplier partners to structure their data - including user reviews - and then allows consumers to access recommendations based on customer feedback and machine learning. This 'recommender' matches brands and products against more than three billion user profiles, and the company also offers brands relevant data about consumer behaviour and spending habits.

New funding has been led by Playfair Capital and Vorwerk Ventures, with participation from a number of angel investors and partners across European funds. Beyer comments: 'Making use of messy data is hard in any industry, but personalising for beauty has so much more nuance that can only be captured by scaling community input. The data platform and software we're building has so many potential use cases for the broader industry'.

Web site: www.sourcerie.co .