TrueFacet Grabs $2.7M In Financing

TrueFacet, a startup that offers an online marketplace focused on luxury jewelry, said Friday (Aug. 21) that it had raised $2.7 million in a funding round led by Maveron, a venture capital firm.

The total funding to date comes to $4.5 million.

GeekWire noted that the financing for the New York-based company was also led by Freestyle Capital and involved a consortium of other investors, including previous investors such as Social Leverage.

Under the company’s business model, TrueFacet lets users buy and sell goods ranging from jewelry to luxury watches, with discounts that come in up to 70 percent off retail prices. Third-party sellers are also allowed to sell jewelry on the site, and sellers are paid up to 80 percent of the resale value of their items, according to GeekWire.

TrueFacet was one of the graduates of the Techstars Seattle class, launched last year, and is seeing about 20 percent month-over-month growth as measured by “gross merchandise” volume. At present the site has 20,000 items across several thousand sellers.

The funding, TrueFacet said, will be earmarked for growth and expansion, primarily to bring new employees to the company.

In recounting the pitch made by the company at the Techstar competition, GeekWire quoted CEO Tirath Kamdar, who noted last year that “when I spent over eight years in the jewelry industry, I noticed every single day when people were shopping and selling pre-owned jewelry, they did not know if they were getting an authentic item or a great price. We built TrueFacet to solve this and have done over $280,000 in gross market sales in our first six months alone. Today, I’m going to tell you why we are going to be the winners in this $70 billion jewelry space.”

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