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Trust aims to give smaller businesses the same advantages that large companies have when marketing on digital and social media platforms. It came out of beta with $ 9 million seed funding from Lerer Hippeau, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures, and Upper90.

The Los Angeles-based company was founded in 2019 by a group of five Snap alums who work in various roles within Snap’s revenue product strategy business. They developed tools for businesses to fund success with digital marketing, but kept hearing from customers about the advantage that large advertisers had over smaller ones – the ability to get good payment terms, credit lines, and data and advice.

With the aim of flipping the script, the group formed Trust, a card and business community that helps digital businesses leverage ever-changing pricing models to market online, get the same incentives bigger advertisers get, and Make the best decision where your marketing dollars will go the furthest.

Trust Dashboard

Trust does this in a number of ways: The card, developed in partnership with Stripe, allows companies to increase their purchasing power by up to 20x and have 45 days to make payments for their marketing investments, CEO James Borow told TechCrunch . Then, as part of their community, companies share knowledge of marketing purchases and data insights that are normally reserved for larger advertisers. Users even get updates on their specific marketing strategy through their dashboard, he added.

“The ad platforms are a wall of gardens and most people don’t know what’s going on inside, so our customers work together to see what’s going on,” said Borow.

The growth of e-commerce is driving more investment in digital marketing and offering Trust an opportunity to become a huge business, Borow said. Ecommerce sales in the US grew 39% in the first quarter, while digital advertising spending is expected to grow 25% to $ 191 billion this year. Meanwhile, Google, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter all recently reported rapid year-over-year growth in their advertising revenues, Borow said.

The new funds are intended to increase the company’s workforce.

“We have active customers on the platform, so we wanted to speed up the hiring process once we got general clearance in place,” he added. “We’re leaving the beta phase with 25 companies and a few hundred on our waiting list.”

This list will grow soon. In addition to the financing round, Trust announced a strategic partnership with the social shopping e-commerce platform Verishop. The company’s 3,500 merchants will have priority access to the trust card and community, Borow said.

Andrea Hippeau, partner at Lerer Hippeau, said she knew Borow as an investor in his former advertising firm Shift, which was acquired by Brand Networks in 2015.

When Borow contacted Lerer about Trust, Hippeau said this was the type of offer applicable to the company’s portfolio, which includes many direct-to-consumer brands, and knew that marketing was a huge pain point for them.

“Digital marketing is important to all brands, but it’s also a black box that you put marketing money into but don’t know what you’re getting,” she said. “We hear this across our portfolio – they spend a lot of money on advertising platforms but are treated like mom and pop businesses in terms of creditworthiness. In reality, Casper outperforms other companies five times. Trust understands the importance of marketing funds and offers them financially better terms. “