Purple Dot, a payment platform for fashion merchandisers that allows consumers to offer to purchase a product at below the retail recommended price, has raised a £1.3 million seed round. The funding was led by Connect Ventures. Other investors partaking in the round include AI Seed, Moxxie Ventures, Andy Chung and Philipp Moehring from AngelList, Vijay Pandurangan (ex-Twitter), Alex Roetter former SVP of Engineering at Twitter and the family office of Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed.com.
Purple Dot is an app that is said to allow retailers to move unsold inventory instead of shipping off the apparel to deep discount locations. The company was founded in August 2019 by Skyscanner employees Madeline Parra (CEO) and John Talbott (CTO). Two founders previosly launched Twizoo, a big data platform for finding and displaying relevant social content, which was sold to Skyscanner in November 2017.
Purple Dot has consumers pay up front and then the retailer can decide to accept the offer – or not. The payment method is designed to sit alongside “buy now, pay later” finance options. Merchants can keep selling at full-price, but know they have a list of shoppers in their book ready to buy at a small discount.
Purple Dot is working with a number of smaller boutiques around the UK and is currently in discussion with some “major UK and US high street brands”.
