Etsy Company Profile. Etsy - Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Fo. Etsy's First Five Years. In early April of 2005, I sat in an orange chair facing an open window.
It was nighttime and the lights were off. I was back in Brooklyn after a brief residence in Paris, and I was about to sketch the initial ideas that would become Etsy. Working with three friends – Chris, Haim and Jared – Etsy went from these ideas to a site live on the Web in about two months. Now, thirty-three months later, Etsy is a company with fifty employees, a community with over 650,000 members, and a marketplace with over 120,000 sellers in 127 different countries. We launched in June of 2005, which means we’re right in the middle of our first five years. Etsy: The Big Idea The simplest way for me to show what Etsy is all about is to read you Swimmy, a book by Leo Leonni. So our vision is to be the eye — to be a kind of organizing principle. Those big companies are holdovers from the days before the Web existed.
Etsy is a company born on the Web, literally. A New Investment What does this mean? Who’s Jim? Etsy Statistics: December Celebrated. Etsy Raises $27 Million; Accel’s Jim Breyer Joins Board. Etsy, the anti-eBay shopping site for handcrafted goods, raised $27 million in a series D round.
It previously raised a total of $4.6 million from Union Square Ventures and angels Caterina Fake, Stewart Butterfield, Joshua Schachter, and Albert Wenger. Union Square Ventures invested again in this round, as did new investor Acel Partners. Accel partner Jim Breyer will take a seat on Etsy’s board (he is also a board member of Facebook). Fake, a founder of Flickr with her husband Butterfield, and Union Square’s Fred Wilson are existing board members. Since launching in June, 2005, Etsy now has 650,000 members, 120,000 of which are craft sellers, in 127 different countries. Etsy founder Rob Kalin says in a blog post: This means that we now have the resources to extend Etsy’s reach in this world, to enable so many more people to make a living making things.
He says that Etsy is “almost break-even” on profits, but he plans on using the money to: Etsy Gets Funded by Web’s All-Stars. Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade items, received a small funding round last week.
The participants included Flickr founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, Albert Wenger (former president of del.icio.us) and Union Square Ventures. The money is going towards a redesign, some new hires and managing Etsy's growth. But the gesture itself is more significant: the web's all stars think Etsy is a winner. Personally, I'm a big Etsy fan. In typical 2.0 fashion, the team seems to release new features every few weeks - using some really impressive Flash tools, you can now shop by color, by location or by time listed, among other things. [via Union Square Ventures] Etsy Investor Gives an Inside Pe. A New Kind of Venture Capitalist Makes Small Bets on Young Firms. Crafty commerce site Etsy gets $27 million in funding. One of New York's most talked about tech start-ups these days is undoubtedly Etsy, the Brooklyn-based online marketplace for buying and selling handmade goods .
And it's continuing to generate headlines: co-founder Robert Kalin announced in a blog post Wednesday that the company has picked up an impressive $27 million in Series D financing. The venture funding comes from existing investors Union Square Ventures and Hubert Burda Media, as well as Accel Partners' Jim Breyer, who will take on a seat on Etsy's board of directors. Etsy is "almost break-even" when it comes to profits, Kalin admitted in his blog post, but it does have 650,000 registered users, 120,000 of whom are classified as "sellers. " The company employs about 50 people, and last year opened the Etsy Labs community space in a converted industrial space in Brooklyn. It's as much a social mission as an economic one, Kalin wrote.