Throughout history, commerce has occurred through marketplaces. Even before modern digital technologies and the internet, a marketplace was simply a place buyers and sellers came together to exchange goods. With the introduction of digital technologies and the internet, marketplaces have gone online.
Some of the early online marketplaces were eBay, Craigslist, and even Amazon. These broad, non-category specific marketplaces grew rapidly, but soon became vulnerable to new entrants who were specializing in a specific segment of the market. This concept called unbundling has accelerated in recent years and can be seen in the image below, the NYC homepage of Craigslist.
Image credit: Andrew Parker
Every company in this image has become a billion dollar plus business. And today, many of these industry platforms are being unbundled further around niche markets. Across retail, eCommerce, and CPG, we see a large opportunity and blank space for a mid to high end creative services platform.
Enter Wripple.
We believe that Wripple is on it’s way to becoming one itself and we’re thrilled to announce our investment.
Wripple is a marketplace that connects creative talent with projects from small businesses to multinational corporations. Wripple focuses on projects that are often done by agencies, but at a lower cost and faster delivery.
The traditional agency model often includes an expensive management layer with seasoned personnel. In order to cover these costs, pricing of the projects need to bake in these costs for the company to be profitable.
Wripple’s platform model flattens the agency layers by bringing automation to the sourcing, vetting, discovery, and delivery models. These activities are often done by that management layer in traditional agencies. Wripple’s position is not only more affordable (20-50% lower than traditional agencies) but faster (100-500% faster in project lead time) and with higher-quality than existing freelance marketplaces.
The Wripple founding team -- Shannon Denton, Bonny Davis Block, and Ray Samuels -- understands the industry like few founding teams do. They were formerly on the leadership team of Razorfish and saw that company through significant growth. They also have positive chemistry having worked together for over 5 years.
Marketplaces have driven innovation in dozens of industries over the past 15 years becoming some of the more valuable venture backed companies in the industry. We believe Wripple will become another and we’re excited to support them as they do.