Two-and-a-half years ago, Shlomi Atar and Gilad Avidan traveled all the way from Israel to participate in TechStars Seattle and fix the problem of instant online publishing.
Fast forward to today, and the Smore founders have made some impressive progress.
Smore has raised a $1.7 million seed round led by Seattle-based Founder’s Co-op, with participation from Greylock Israel and various angels. The company, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, helps small businesses with an online flyer-maker that allows users to design compelling content.
Smore, which also offers analytics and other marketing tools, has attracted more than 500,000 registered users who have created more than 1 million flyers. Avidan tell us that the platform is seeing 20 percent growth per month in usage and revenue.
With those stats and momentum, the four-person startup wondered if it should even take outside funding. But Avidan and Atar feel like they have a huge opportunity to help small business owners with their digital marketing efforts — particularly those who have little-to-no experience with promoting their services on the Internet.
“While we could grow Smore out gradually over a few years, we feel the opportunity in online promotion for the masses is here and now,” Avidan writes in this blog post.
After working in the Techstars Seattle incubator in the fall of 2011, Avidan and Atar returned to Tel Aviv and continued to hone their product. They then created a “Smore Pro,” paid product and quickly began turning profits.
Founder’s Co-op, which led Smore’s initial small angel round while the company was in Seattle, kept in touch with the founders and liked what they saw.
“Gilad and Shlomi entered TechStars as gifted makers, and their obsession with digital craftsmanship will always be the core of their firm’s culture,” Founder’s Co-op General Partner Chris DeVore wrote. “But two years of heads-down company-building helped them hone new skills and insights about how to turn beautiful product into real business value. As soon as they felt ready to flex those new muscles, we jumped at the chance to lead the raise we’re announcing today.”
Smore plans to use the fresh funding to enable content creation on mobile, expand its mailing list product and build simplified paid promotions for different platforms.
DeVore noted that he doesn’t expect Smore to “behave like every other startup,” just because they’ve raised some money.
“They’ve always done things their own way and this raise just gives them a little more space to be themselves,” he writes. “All I know is that it’s going to be both beautiful and useful, and that’s an excellent place to start.”
