Riga, Latvia-based Printify recently announced it has raised $3 million in funding to expand on its marketplace for custom printing. Printify now has 80 employees and it graduated from the 500 Startups accelerator.
Recently, Printify announced it raised $3 million in funding from Bling Capital — which is a venture capital fund that launched about five months ago by former Khosla Ventures general partner Ben Ling.
Some of the other investors in this round include YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, ClassPass co-founder Fritz Lanman, DoorDash co-founder Evan Moore, Gokul Rajaram (credited as one of the creators of Google AdSense), and Facebook VP of product Kevin Weil.
Printify was founded in 2015 by CEO James Berdigans, Artis Kehris, and Gatis Dukurs. Berdigans told TechCrunch that the company started out by requiring merchants to sell their items on its platform.
“The problem is that these merchants don’t have the capability to build their own brand,” said Berdigans. “At the end of the day, you end up building the Teespring brand, not your own brand.”
Now Printify is operating as a B2B marketplace that is connecting manufacturers with e-commerce stores. And Printify handles order fulfilling, billing, manufacturing requests, and shipping. By switching to this model, Printify started growing at 30% year-over-year and added hundreds of unique products to its catalog.
One of the biggest advantages that Printify offers is that it allows merchants to determine their own margins. Other platforms require do not allow creators to price their own product.
“Printify is perfectly positioned to enable the new trend of micro and boutique brands,” added Ling. “Consumers and SMBs alike can benefit from Printify’s high-quality, low-cost, and fast printing platform — and create their own micro-brands.”
