Zyper raises $6.5m in Series A funding

Zyper has just announced that their Series A funding round raised $6.5m. This latest round brings the startup’s total funding to $8.5m.

The company’s Series A funding round was led by Talis Capital with participation from Forerunner Ventures and Y Combinator.

Zyper is a new marketing platform; connecting brands with their ‘superfans’ in an effort to drive engagement, insights and sales. Among the brands using the startup’s platform are Topshop, Banana Republic and Nestlé. Zyper sources the top 1% of a brand’s biggest fans using computer vision and natural language processing, then Zyper leverage them as brand advocates instead of paid influencers. This means truly passionate customers can become stealth marketers for the companies.

Amber Atherton, Founder of Zyper, said: “Storytelling and transparency have become paramount for brands as consumers look to engage with them in a more authentic and unfiltered way.

“Zyper is creating an entirely new category of community-based brand advocacy that will drive sales and surface significant consumer insights.

“We’re thrilled to partner with this prestigious group of investors, who will be instrumental in helping us bring our platform to even more companies seeking true brand advocates.”

The platform aims to improve the quality, scalability and efficiency of community marketing, allowing brands to track and manage their fans automatically using advanced machine-learning models. This model is a radical reimagining of the current model of brand marketing.

Zyper’s fresh capital will be used to open the company’s headquarters in San Francisco as well as to continue developing its predictive analytics engine and recommendation system algorithms.

Kirill Tasilov from Talis Capital added: “Zyper is on a path to become a transformational company that enables brands to identify and collaborate with their superfans across a number of social media channels.