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Bootstrapping Barcelona-based visual commerce startup Photoslurp<\/a>\u00a0has taken its first external funding: Announcing\u00a0\u20ac750,000 (~$870k) in pre-Series A financing, led by Spanish VC Inveready Technology Investment Group, with participation from Bankinter VC, Caixa Capital Risc and ICF<\/a>.<\/p>\n The team\u2019s SaaS platform is designed for brands to build influence by leveraging user generated content (UGC) in their marketing \u2014 with the underlying premise being that online advertising is delivering diminishing returns, thereby placing more importance on \u2018native advertising\u2019 techniques, and specifically on embedded UGC as a key avenue for digital marketing.<\/p>\n Photoslurp\u2019s tech works by crawling social media platforms (specifically Instagram, Facebook and Twitter) looking for tagged photos and videos of products being used in the wild \u2014 to act as \u201cshoppable social proof\u201d, as it calls it, to help brands sell their stuff via integrating the UGC into their online stores, in a \u2018shop this look\u2019 format.<\/p>\n The harvesting of relevant UGC is done automatically by the platform \u2014 after which there\u2019s an intended manual curation process to refine the final selections.<\/p>\n \u201cOur platform collects visual content that has been hashtagged with those hashtags related to the brand. Through our collection dashboard brands have an array of tools that allows them to perform logic hashtag searches into the social networks, as well as blacklisting both secondary hashtags and\/or users,\u201d says Photoslurp\u2019s Ruud den Rooijen.<\/p>\n \u201cBesides the logic hashtag searches and blacklisting, where our technology automatically dismisses inappropriate content, collected imagery is shown to the brand, or to our curation team, in a moderation dashboard where the brand\u2019s have the ultimate say on the imagery that ends up in their digital channels. This ensures that all imagery always matches the image the brand wants to communicate.\u201d<\/p>\n While the platform crawls multiple social networks, Instagram is (unsurprisingly) the main source of UGC that\u2019s considered shiny enough by brands to double as appropriate marketing sides \u2014 Photoslurp tells us that 98 per cent of the collected content is generated there.<\/p>\n The startup, which was founded in 2014, says it\u2019s working with over 150 brands across 20 countries in Europe at this stage. It name-checks the likes of Links of London, Folli Follie, Tally Weijl, Cluse Watches, Adolfo Dom\u00ednguez and Lindblad Expeditions as some of its flagship clients.<\/p>\n The new funding will go on further development of the platform, including spending on\u00a0image recognition tech to \u201cfurther help ease the detection of products\u201d from the UGC pool, and on ramping up on sales and marketing globally.<\/p>\n On the competitive front, the startup names Olapic<\/a>, Curalate<\/a> and BazaarVoice<\/a> as playing in a similar space \u2014 though says it\u2019s differentiating by focusing on brands in the SME space vs targeting larger, enterprise players.<\/p>\n \u201cGrowing brands benefit hugely from the visual content tools that we provide, and is a market that was not catered to before we joined the game,\u201d argues den Rooije.<\/p>\n He adds that RD efforts fueled by the need funding will also be targeted at helping its target brands make more out of the organic content their customers are creating and uploading.<\/p>\n