Sydney-based social search site Posse is about to embark on a fresh funding round as it looks to take on rivals like Foursquare and Google Maps.
The platform allows users to create their own ‘streets’ where they can list and recommend businesses, with businesses able to pay for insights into user activity — with the potential to use it for targeted marketing — from April.
Founder Rebekah Campbell expects to hit the $1.5 million target “pretty quickly” through tapping Posse’s existing investor base, which includes the likes of Facebook’s director of engineering for search, Lars Rasmussen, and VC veteran Bill Tai.
“We’ve had a lot of interest in this space at the moment, there’s a lot of interest around other Australian tech companies so it’s a really good time to be looking for funding,” Campbell says.
Posse has already raised around $3 million to date, and plans to use the additional funding to accelerate its growth.
This will include, in addition to introducing a $10-a-month upgraded listing option, an Android app release (currently there’s only an iPhone app) and the launch of Posse’s first fully-fledged marketing campaign.
Campbell says Posse will also continue commercialising through brand promotions on the site, which so far have included Sydney’s Strand Arcade and Melbourne’s QV building.
Through word-of-mouth alone, the start-up has already notched up 150,000 downloads and 43,000 business listings. The goal is to reach one million users and 200,000 listings by the end of the year, says Campbell.
Posse, which has offices in Sydney and Manila, will focus on strengthening its presence in Australian cities as well as New Zealand, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore.
“The Singapore market’s actually really important to us because of the high proportion of English speakers and just the amount of Australians who travel there,” Campbell says.
Campbell’s New York Times blog has helped cement a presence for the platform in the Big Apple.
After that, the next stop is Japan.
“Japan is a big opportunity because people in Japan love the artwork and there’s no social recommendation out there, there’s a gap in the market,” Campbell says.
Posse’s delightful illustrations are a distinguishing feature, with 300 original shopfront templates, created by an in-house illustrator, matched to each listing using Google Maps.
Posse’s other main point of difference is its use of crowdsourcing to map shop interiors, with listed owners able to take 360 degree images of their businesses.
“Google goes and films inside shops when they’re closed,” says Campbell.
“Technically it’s [Posse’s] not quite as good as what Google can offer, but it gives a much better sense of what a shop is like when it’s buzzing and full of people.”
Already “a few thousand” businesses have taken advantage of the interior mapping feature, says Campbell, though it has “only just” gone live.
Posse takes on Google Maps with new capital raising
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