Spare5, a Seattle, WA-based new mobile-optimized, on-demand insights platform, raised $3.25m in seed financing.
Backers included New Enterprise Associates, the Foundry Group, Madrona Venture Group, Oren Etzioni, entrepreneur and Director of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and other angels. In conjunction with the funding, Madrona Venture Group Managing Director Greg Gottesman and Foundry’s Brad Feld will join the Spare5 Board.
Spun out of Madrona Venture Labs, a startup studio housed at Madrona that prototypes, builds and launches new software applications and services, Spare5 is a mobile application that pays people to provide expert insights in their spare time.
The company is initially focused on helping ecommerce companies increase sales through expert image tagging and data clean up. It sends paid projects to people on their smartphones based on their experience, hobbies and the quality of their responses. Led by CEO and co-founder Matt Bencke, Patrick O’Donnell, Daryn Nakhuda, and Matt Shobe, Spare5 indexes app users on dozens of criteria to match the right experts to a given task.
FinSMEs
08/12/2014