Elephanti, a startup that’s supposed to make it easier for physical stores to connect with shoppers online, is announcing that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding from LMJ Holdings.
The basic selling point for consumers, according to founder and CEO Lalin Michael Jinasena, is avoiding situations where you end up wandering from store and store, asking, “Do you sell Item X?” Instead, you can just visit the website or open the app, then search for a specific item, bringing up a list of stores that carry it. Or you can look up a retailer and browse a catalog of in-store items.
The concept isn’t too different from Milo, the local shopping startup that acquired by eBay back in 2010, but Elephanti has a number of additional features that make it more than just a product search engine.
For one thing, after shoppers identify their interests, Elephanti can show them recommendations and offers from nearby stores. Users can also build shopping lists with multiple items and and the app will point to stores where they can buy all the items on the list. Plus, shoppers can check-in at stores and, in a promised update, share photos of what they’ve purchased, so their friends will know that something is really in-stock and available at a certain price.
Since the company is working directly with merchants, Jinasena said it’s focused on a specific geography (namely, San Francisco) for now, although it works in other cities. In fact, I tested it out today in Los Angeles, and perhaps it would’ve have saved my mother some time — a few days ago, she was hopping from store to store in search of baklava. When I opened the app, it instantly identified the restaurant where she eventually found what she was looking for. (By the way, the site’s product catalogs include menus too.)
The product search isn’t perfect. I also tried to find a mop (don’t ask), but the app would only recommend places where I could buy Mophies and albums by the band Moped.
As far as I can tell, Elephanti doesn’t incorporate real-time inventory data and instead asks stores to manually build and update their catalogs, but I’m confirming that with a company spokesperson.
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