Pop-Up Marketplace Appear Here Sees $12M Series B

Short-term retail rental startup Appear Here, a company whose marketplace was built to serve the growing ‘pop-up’ trend in retail, just recently raised some $12 million in a Series B venture funding round.

Appear Here’s Series B round was led by Octopus Ventures and saw participation from Simon Venture group as well as existing investors Balderton, MMC, Meyer Bergman and Playfair Capital. All told, the company has raised $21.4 million to date in three rounds of funding according to Crunchbase.

Appear Here’s online marketplace for short-term retail rentals began in London in 2013, and has since expanded nationally to a number of cities in the U.K as well as internationally, breaking into Paris and more recently New York City.

“With our international expansion, we’re excited to continue to build deep relationships in the top retail cities around the world,” founder and CEO Ross Bailey said in a statement. “Appear Here is the world leader at what we do and this is the perfect time for us to scale. We’ve got offices in London, Paris and New York, and now we’re looking forward to launching more tools and opening up new locations for our growing community to take their ideas to the next level”.

The pop-up store is nothing new in concept. Malls have had kiosks since time immemorial, and once a year around the country phantom Halloween shops appear overnight. But in the early 2010s, there began a pop-up renaissance of sorts.

After 2008, pop-ups were largely used as a cost-cutting effort by small, independent retailers unsure about opening a permanent location in the wake of the recession. As the economy began to recover and commerce moved online, pop-ups have continued to thrive. Today, they’re a key marketing and sales tactic for everyone from digitally native and startup brands to legacy retailers.