BOSTON– Wayfair CEO and co-founder Niraj Shah has invested in the new round of funding for Lovepop, a Boston-based startup that uses design software and laser cutters to make 3-D greeting cards, according to news reports.
Boston Business Journal reported that this round of funding was led by Boston-based Accomplice Ventures and also included Shah of Wayfair, Bob White of Bain Capital, and Wayne Chang of Crashlytics and Twitter. Lovepop has raised $6 million in Series A funding.
Lovepop was founded by Wombi Rose and John Wise who became best friends at Webb Institute training to become naval architects. After school, the duo traveled to Vietnam where they discovered incredible hand-crafted paper cards, according to the company’s website.
“They headed back to Boston and put the cards in the hands of friends, family, and strangers–and watched. That moment when someone opened a card and saw the paper sculpture revealed for the first time became their obsession, and Lovepop was born,” according to the Lovepop website.
The two launched Lovepop out out of the Harvard Innovation Lab in late 2014. Since then, they were named to the 2015 Techstars class, nominated for 50 on Fire by BostInno, and gained the confidence of professional investors.
Boston Business Journal said Lovepop raised $2.6 million in November 2015, and then added another $300,000 from “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary.
Shah is CEO, Co-Chairman and Co-Founder of Wayfair. He co-founded Wayfair with Steve Conine in 2002 and the pair rapidly grew the business to become the largest online retailer of home furnishings and home items in the U.S., surpassing $2.25 billion in annual sales in 2015.
Before founding Wayfair, Shah was CEO and co-founder of Simplify Mobile, an enterprise software company which was sold in 2001. Prior to that, he served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Greylock Partners, COO and a member of the Board of Directors at iXL, a publicly traded global technology consulting firm, and the CEO and co-founder of Spinners, which was sold to iXL in 1998.
