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Verve rebrands to Pollen and raises $60 Million to expand businesses by acquiring Lifestlez, a travel and sport experience.
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FREMONT, CA: The wheels of the internet are in motion due to influencer marketing, quirky personalities attracting traffic and buzz, which helps shift sentiments and products for brands. The influencers give boosts to both online engagement and commerce. Verve, a London-based startup, which enacts as an influencer in the area of selling tickets to events and experiences, raised funding aiming business expansion.
Verve has raised $60 million as a part of its rebranding to the new version of itself, Pollen. The newly formed Pollen reflects the redoubled consumer focus along with being a SaaS platform sold to companies on a B2B basis for constructing their marketing campaigns. The company has sold 1 million experiences since its conception in 2014, with 330,000 sold only in the last year. Verve has been recognized as one of the 20 Most Promising Retail Solution Providers-2019 by the CIO Review magazine.
“We are going to drive persistently and be a player in the industry, and we are going to build upon that trust, and our experience in the industry,” says Mark Fruehan, Executive Vice President, Enterprise and Platforms, at Verve. “For retailers, claiming turf is about identifying moments to make meaningful contact with now and future customers. We do that by understanding what they love the most, and permissions-granted data help show us what those things are and will be", he added.
Pollen is acquiring a company called Lifestylez, which specializes in ski and snowboard trips for college students, to expand its business. Being famous for providing access to music concerts, club nights, and one-off experiences, Pollen is set to utilize the funds to deep expansion into sports and travel such as beach holidays, city breaks, ski trips, and festivals.
“In today’s world, young people want to maximise what they want to do with their life because they’re more aware of the opportunities out there and their own potential.” Says Callum, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, Pollen. “Our model will allow members and their friends to discover and access experiences that are usually out of reach and at the same time create an incredibly powerful distribution channel for brands. This funding will allow us to move into more verticals and continue our global expansion", added he.
The growth funding round was led by Northzone. It also included other VCs like Sienna Capital, Draper Esprit, Backed and Kindred, and many others. Pollen has raised $100 million until now and has not disclosed its total valuation. The CEO Callum Negus-Fancey, with his brother Liam has reportedly said that the value is now 3.7 times more worth the previous round.
As Negus-Fancey describes, the era of the influencers is well and truly upon the social: the billboards of new media. It has become a significant method for the brands to reach their desired kind of audiences, more likely the younger demographics who are spending substantial time on social platforms and those whose tastes are conjugated by the posts of the influencers they associate with.
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