With a 77% drop in retail shopping post-pandemic and 83% rise in online shopping, the UK’s online gift market is growing rapidly. Relatively, a new gifting app, Prsnt recently raised £180,000 from Suss Ventures, the bespoke investor matching service at Sussex Innovation.
The Brighton-based tech startup aims to dominate the gifting marketplace by creating a peer-to-peer gift exchange platform to leverage the “feel good” factor of giving and receiving gifts. The investment will streamline the app after its successful beta testing and grow its user base as part of ongoing business and technological development.
Be Prsnt without being present
Prsnt co-founded by a team of 5 aims to create an app that enables users to send and receive gifts to their friends and family from their favourite high-street brands instantly. The app can send gifts with a personalised video or text message as a nice gesture, or in celebration of an occasion.
The app has also partnered with UK’s high street brands to send and receive gifts to anyone in the country. To keep the moment of unwrapping the gift alive, it allows unwrapping the gift digitally with your fingers and sending back a message to say “Thank you”.
Currently, the platform is available for a +44 number only. The company is also developing their platform across the UK and US by partnering with brands which are specific to geographical territory.
Omid Moallemi, Co-founder of Prsnt, states: “How amazing would it be if gifting was more than a card, chocolates, a stamp, and some sellotape? Prsnt is centred around small thoughtful gifts, where you can spend just two pounds on something like a coffee, with a personalised greeting video. It’s the same cost as posting a birthday card just without the environmental impact of postage and packaging. We spent the first 6 months working on the idea with a very limited budget. When the lockdown hit, a lot of the VCs were saying they’re just backing their existing portfolios, but people were very receptive to our idea. It was great having Laurence, founder of Suss Ventures, to guide us through the journey and we developed a good amount of trust, which is very important to us.”
Louis Wren, Co-Founder of Prsnt adds, “We spent a lot of time profiling and seeking out the very best investment partners, leaving no stone unturned and being deliberate about who we wanted to align with. Suss Ventures helped connect us with a VC that shared our values, vision and long-term strategy. They will now join us on this journey for the foreseeable future thanks to the introduction through Laurence.”
Laurence Grant, Founder of Suss Ventures, comments, “It’s been a real pleasure to get to know Omid, the Prsnt team, and the product itself. The app is reinventing the market of gift-giving by leveraging the power of technology and consumer brand partnerships. Besides making me personally more popular among friends, having been able to give away three free coffees as part of the due diligence process, it’s clear that Prsnt has given hundreds of users the joy of reciprocity in these isolating times. I have no doubt Prsnt will be here to stay as an innovative platform that continually celebrates friends and family in new, exciting, and rewarding ways. Congratulations to the entire Prsnt team!”
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