Wantr raises $600,000 to take virtual window-shopping to the next level

Social commerce startup Wantr (wantr.com) comes out of invite-only, takes virtual window-shopping to the next level by updating you on the latest arrivals from your favorite online stores. In addition, the company is announcing a $600K investment led by SEED Capital.

Follow your favorite stores

Online stores add exciting new arrivals all the time, and now with Wantr, you can collect them all in one place. Simply add the stores you want to follow, and Wantr will notify you every time they update. 

Co-founder Toke Grøfte explains:

“Before Wantr, I used to visit the same five or six online stores every day to see if they had any cool new sneakers, oftentimes to no avail. We really felt there had to be a better way to stay on top of your favorite shopping sites. What we wanted to create was a fun and simple way for new product arrivals to find you, rather than you trying to find them.”

Any online store, every new arrival

On Wantr, people can add any given category page from stores they want to follow, like “Women’s New Arrivals” from Asos.com or “Kids’ Shoes” from Nike.com. Wantr then keeps a watch on these pages, and immediately lets you know when new products arrive. This makes Wantr the first shopping tool where people can aggregate all the latest arrivals from any online store, in a single place.

Discover amazing stores and products

Not only is Wantr an efficient tool to stay updated on your favorite stores – it is also a great place to discover a world of new ones. Every product on Wantr comes with a “Want” button that lets you save your amazing shopping finds to a personal collection on the site, and as you save things, your friends on Wantr also get to discover them. In this way, the Wantr community comes together to help each other discover new and interesting products from the world’s best online stores.

$600,000 to accelerate product development

The investment is led by SEED Capital, with participation from angel investors including the founding duo behind European fashion bazaar Trendsales. CEO Stefan Bech explains:

“With the investment, we will be able to move much faster. We are bringing additional engineering talent on board and remain focused on building a killer product.”

Screenshot of the Wantr home page for a logged-in user

Wantr facts

• Founded in 2012 by Stefan Bech (CEO) and Toke Grøfte (CMO)
• Based out of Copenhagen, Denmark, and counts seven employees
• Featured on This Week in Startups with @jason during alpha test
• Launched to the public in March 2013

For more information, please contact

Stefan Bech, CEO/Co-founder, stefan at wantr dot com, +45 6166 6551

Toke Grøfte, CMO/Co-founder, toke at wantr dot com, +45 2614 9019

Experienced .NET Hacker Wanted for Kickin’ Social Commerce Platform

We are looking for an outstanding web developer for our team in Copenhagen. You will be joining a tight crew of web and marketing professionals, each with 10+ years of experience. We are fanatical user experience designers and social media freaks, pointy-hatted architects and longhaired coders, and some of us have a thing for heavy metal… We build beautiful digital products on a highly scalable cloud platform.

You should be a generalist and enjoy working across the software stack. Our current technologies include Windows Azure and SQL Azure, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, Castle Windsor IoC, nHibernate, Html Agility Pack and jQuery.

We look for engineers with a getting-things-done attitude who take pride in finding simple and efficient solutions to a variety of technical challenges. You should strive to write efficient, maintainable code and you are not afraid to push code every day.

We expect you to be a team player with enthusiasm for working collaboratively in an agile and fast-paced environment. We expect you to care deeply about the end-result and overall user experience, and you understand that the devil is in the detail.

You can answer yes to several of the following areas:

• Deep ASP.NET MVC and C# skills, and experience with domain-driven design
• Working experience in structured development and build environments (continuous integration, automated testing, automated configuration and deployment)
• Experience with internet programming (REST, SOAP, client/server, AJAX)
• Solid database skills (SQL Server or similar)
• Experience with HTML, CSS, JavaScript + jQuery or similar, AJAX + JSON
• Innate curiosity towards new technologies, programming languages, frameworks, etc.

Bonus points for experience with:

• Facebook development (Graph API, Canvas Apps)
• Windows Azure and SQL Azure
• Web crawling and scraping technologies such as Html Agility Pack
• Google Analytics or similar
• Graph databases such as Neo4j
• CQRS pattern

What we can offer:

• Ambitious, international startup environment in Copenhagen, Denmark
• Great office space and location on central Vesterbrogade
• Die-hard, no-surrender, semper fi, agile team of web geeks, and GREAT colleagues
• Interesting and TOUGH engineering challenges
• Opportunity to make an impact – we are completely reinventing the interface between consumers and online stores
• Warrants/co-ownership – if you are truly hot shit

We expect you to be:

• An absolute rock star at what you do
• 3+ years of professional experience, or you may be a self-taught whiz-kid with otherworldly Jedi powers
• Fluent in English (speaking, reading and writing)
• Always ahead of the curve with cutting-edge web development 

Qualified candidates, please email Stefan Bech on stefan [at] wantr.com.

About us:
At Wantr, we want to change the way people discover and shop online. It is a bold mission that we will accomplish with equal parts determination and disruptive technology. We are an extremely ambitious bunch with a global outlook. We believe in data-driven decision-making, hard work, personal freedom and the responsibility to choose the right solutions, technologies and approaches that will take our product to the next level.