The funding came from a mix of angels and institutional investors, including WI Harper, Crosslink, New Atlantic Ventures, and Artiman. The PlaySwell team includes several distinguished startup ventures and is led by Jordan Greenhall, who was the founding CEO of DivX. PlaySwell has made it their mission to build a new type of online community where people can showcase and share products that they’ve discovered. The Alpha site has already attracted an interesting catalogue of high-quality everyday consumer goods including everything form pocket knives, headphones, and drones. According to Greenhall, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter should exist as the places where this kind of sharing and discovery takes place, but they’ve all dropped the ball. That’s because, as he says, large players prioritize advertising revenue over the actual quality of the things promoted on their platforms. As the social media landscape becomes increasingly dominated by advertising dollars, the rule is becoming: if you don’t have the means to buy an audience, you will get lost in the noise. The PlaySwell vision is a world where people help each other and advertising is a fading memory from an unfortunate period of history – it’s a very refreshing take from the consumer side of life.
