Expa, Ellen Pao and others infuse product discovery platform Kit with $2.5M round

by Taylor Majewski
November 15, 2016

Kit, a product discovery platform born out of Expa’s startup studio, announced today it raised a $2.5 million seed round.

Social Capital, Precursor Venture, April Underwood, Ellen Pao, Authentic Ventures, Black Angel Tech Fund and Expa all participated in the round.

Kit’s social network site allows users to discover and recommend products — all grouped into categories of interest dubbed ‘kits.’ Through community creators, like Youtube personality Casey Neistat or Gimlet co-founder Matthew Lieber, users can find curated groups of products depending on their interests. These kits encompass a wide range of product types, from wedding filmmaking to kitchen gear.

Today, the company also launched ‘Ask Kit,’ an experimental service that will answer users questions about products via Amazon Alexa and Twitter. Today’s announcements follow Kit’s recently launched partnership program, which allows creators to actually make money using the platform.

The company is planning on using the new funding to build out its team, continue to iterate on its product and expands its capabilities when it comes to search and monetization. Kit is currently located in Expa’s New York City space, and is one of the few recent projects to grow out of the studio.

“Our long-term vision is to catalogue the world’s best products across all sorts of categories,” said Kit co-founder and CEO Camille Hearst. “So far, we’ve focused on building tools for creators to make kits and recommend products. Now, we want to know how we use this great information we have to recommend products. I’m excited about investing in that moving forward as we start to experiment with the consumer experience.”

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