A German live and social shopping SaaS solution provider, LiSA, has grabbed €2.7 million investment in a seed round led by TechVision Fonds (TVF). Previously, the German startup received funding from the UK’s VC Venrex (which backed Verse) and angel investor Georgie Smallwood, part of Accel’s first cohort of Scouts and chief product officer at micro-mobility startup Tier.
Accelerate further growth
The investment will help in accelerating the growth of its social commerce SaaS business. LiSA will expand internationally and develop social commerce cloud to enable frictionless, cross-platform, social shopping experiences. Its live shopping SaaS solution will be developed into a one-stop-shop for social commerce experiences.
Sophie Frères, LiSA’s founder & CEO, said: ”The booming social e-commerce market has reached a level of maturity where it’s increasingly unmanageable for retailers to use up to 20 different little feature plugins. Also, seamless cross-platform experiences are simply expected by users. This funding allows us to address this holistically, by rapidly scaling our headless solutions and social commerce cloud. We are very excited about the new group of investors coming aboard the LiSA ship, joining early investors such as Founders Factory.”
Pascal Bless, TVF Investment Manager said: ”LiSA brings ecommerce into the 21st century – The digitization of shops had an enormous impact. The purchase can now be made quickly, anywhere and anytime. Social components were increasingly lost. With LiSA, we are entering the next evolution of shopping, where shopping remains digital with all its benefits and where the very much-needed social elements are brought back.”
Georgie Smallwood, CPO at Tier and Scout for Accel, commented: “LiSA offers a cutting edge solution for e-commerce to easily take advantage of the booming social shopping channel. Without the need to build clunky custom technology, e-commerce platforms and businesses already love the new consumers and high engagement rates that LiSA brings.”
Founded by husband-wife duo
LiSA was founded by the two pioneers, husband and wife, Sophie and Philipp Frères. Having spent over 20 years in the retail industry, the duo witnessed firsthand how live shopping can engage online audiences and drive organic community growth. This is powering their mission to help e-commerce retailers leverage the untapped potential of social discovery.
The company is also developing a social commerce cloud, which will include headless solutions to facilitate cross-platform discovery for users as well as an API-based partnership network.
The German startup participated in London-based Founders Factory accelerator program in 2019 and the New York Fashion Tech Lab in 2021. LiSA’s solutions have proven to help e-retailers’ reach customer engagement levels of up to 90%, online conversion rates of up to 35% and organic social sharing rates of up to 14%.
