Storefront, a startup that launched this past fall out of San Francisco startup accelerator AngelPad focusing on helping businesses find short-term real estate rentals for “pop-up shops” and other temporary stores, is set to announce today that it’s taken on $1.6 million in seed funding.
The investors in the seed round include Mohr Davidow Ventures, Great Oaks VC, 500 Startups, David Tisch’s Box Group, Sand Hill Angels, among other angel investors.
Storefront’s co-founder and CEO Erik Eliason said in an interview that the new funding will be put toward helping the service expand beyond its native San Francisco, where over the past six months the company has helped over 100 large and local brands open pop-up shops (including the Storenvy space which we recently profiled for TechCrunch TV) and listed over 3 million square feet of retail space. That geographical expansion is already underway, with the recent launch of Storefront listings in New York City.
The funding will also be used to add more hires to Storefront’s team, which currently has six full-time staff.
The idea behind Storefront is to help make it just as easy to open a brick-and-mortar shop as it now is to sell stuff online. “Our bigger vision is that it’s really easy to open a store online with Etsy or Storenvy. But offline there are still so many friction points with setting up a store,” Eliason said. “Things like Square make things like payments easier, but finding the space, securing the space, furnishing the space — it’s not an easy process.”
Traditional commercial real estate brokers are great for long-term real estate searches, but they are not focused on the short-term rental space for the increasingly popular “pop-up” market, because it’s not as lucrative for commissions. Craiglist has short-term real estate listings, but those come with all the hassles that exist for, well, everything on Craigslist.
Storefront does not charge any commission on the rental of a space itself. The startup makes money by taking a referral fee for any purchases that it helps facilitate after the space has been leased, such as sales of furniture, fixtures, temporary staff, signage, and insurance.
Overall, it’s a smart idea at a very smart time (with a catchy name to boot), so it’s no wonder that it’s gotten the attention of investors. If Storefront can execute its vision throughout the U.S., it could turn into something big.
