Jet’s Series A Funding is Officially Closed

As reported this morning in the Wall Street Journal, I am excited to announce that Jet has secured an additional $20mm of growth capital fromWestern Technology Investments (“WTI”) and a $5mm asset-backed facility from Silicon Valley Bank (“SVB”), bringing our Series A round to a total of $80M. We believe this capital is an incredible first step on our ambitious journey.

Jet is building a new kind of e-commerce experience, uniquely grounded in transparency and customer empowerment. Over the last two decades, technology pioneers have already worked to turn these ideals into reality. Dell’s build-your-own model changed how people shopped for computers, revealing component pricing and allowing customers to pay only for the hardware they valued. Priceline’s name-your-price tool enabled travelers to declare what they were willing to pay for a trip, while giving airlines a way to efficiently monetize empty seats. Zipcar and Airbnb reduced costs for consumers by maximizing usage of previously underutilized assets. Today, Uber is delivering car-service on demand by instantly connecting riders with rides, a welcome disruption to an otherwise friction-filled customer experience.

In retail, e-commerce brands have fundamentally altered the way people shop — putting more power in consumers’ hands through democratizing tools like price comparisons, ratings and reviews. But there is still more work to be done if we are to truly to live up to our stated ideals of greater transparency and customer empowerment. We have to ask ourselves: What are the hidden costs in e-commerce? Are there aspects of e-commerce that don’t make sense? And most importantly, how do we expose these inefficiencies and empower customers to eliminate them?

We are building Jet to answer these questions — and to further the customer empowerment revolution begun by those before us. We will be sharing additional details about Jet in the coming weeks and encourage you to sign up to receive updates atJet.com.

Originally published at marcericlore.tumblr.com.