Hammoq Closes $24 Million Round; Tackles Exploding Retail Returns and Used Goods Market with AI Platform
Startup has Automated More than a Half Million Resale Product Listings Across a Broad Network of eCommerce Marketplaces Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Hammoq Inc., the company powering reCommerce sellers with artificial intelligence (AI) to run their business on autopilot, today announced that it has secured $24 million in equity plus debt financing. This latest financing round was led by Sierra Ventures, with participation from the company’s pre-seed lead investor Origin Ventures and brings its total financing to date to $27 million.
A glut of online retail returns and a flourishing market for sustainable fashion upcycling and vintage items has created an exploding reCommerce industry. With this financing round, Hammoq will accelerate development of its AI and machine learning platform to automate marketplace listings and open up channels for reseller financing as well as product sourcing.
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“The reCommerce market is exploding, with the fashion resale market alone expected to reach $26 billion in 2022,” said Sid Lunawat, CEO and Co-Founder of Hammoq. “There are an abundance of resale marketplaces supporting this economy. Yet, the largest gap is in the labor required to identify product value and push it to the marketplaces. With rising labor costs, the need for automation in the reCommerce industry continues to grow. Using AI and machine learning, Hammoq has put a major dent in this labor gap, empowering its customers to automate the identification and listing process. Our latest funding will accelerate tech development while supporting our sales and marketing strategies to capitalize on this rising opportunity.”
Goodwill of the San Francisco Bay and Hammoq share a deep commitment to sustainability. Hammoq’s AI technology is helping Goodwill to process more material donations, more quickly to help divert more items from landfill. Donated items are given a second life in Goodwill thrift stores.
Another customer of Hammoq is reseller Flip the World. “Before we brought Hammoq on to handle our listings, I would average around 40-50 listings a week. Listing across platforms is time consuming work and after a full day of sourcing, cleaning, prepping and photographing I found that I was falling asleep in bed trying to get my listings up,” said Chris Hatfield, Owner, Flip the World. “Now with Hammoq, we’ve more than doubled our weekly listings and have gone from a 500-item store to over 2,000 in less than two months. It’s been a game changer for our business. Now we can focus on the most important part of reselling, sourcing the items, rather than the listing.”
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Hammoq was co-founded by reCommerce industry veterans Sid Lunawat and Ty Blunt, sustainability advocates who believe the 80 billion resalable items dropped in landfills every year have a viable purpose for prolonged use. After successful stints running a reseller business, Lunawat and Blunt understood that identifying and easily listing products for resale was an acute pain point. To solve this challenge, they developed the Hammoq software platform using AI and machine learning to enable listing at scale. Starting with a simple photo, the platform uses product data to automatically enable listings across dozens of resale marketplaces. Hammoq has listed over 600,000 products for sale and ensures 100% compliance with data listing requirements prior to pushing to the marketplaces.
“Hammoq is uniquely serving the exploding reCommerce industry by applying technology to solve sellers’ largest challenge: intelligent, real-time listings,” said Vignesh Ravikumar, Partner, Sierra Ventures. “Their solution and business model are well aligned with our mission to invest early in emerging technology companies that are moving the needle in key market areas. Their SaaS reCommerce solution is delivering precisely what the rapidly transforming market needs as consumers actively seek ways to buy used products that support sustainability and reuse.”
