Chirpify Will Allow Payments Wherever Brands Advertise — Which Is Everywhere

A newly funded Chirpify is moving beyond social selling to facilitate the buying of advertised goods wherever brands are advertising.

Chirpify began in July 2011 as Sell Simp.ly, allowing users to buy products by replying to tweets. In early 2012, the company received $50,000 in seed funding and rebranded as Chirpify. Soon the service was working on Facebook and Pinterest.

Its humble beginnings are far behind it now. Last week the company announced it had raised $4 million to complete a $6 million Series A round of funding and is moving to convert — by “convert” Chirpify means buy stuff — ads at live events and on television. Offers will appear at concerts and games on the Jumbotron or many video screes now in place at arenas, as well as on TV, and users will move to social media to signal their intent to buy by posting a hashtag on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest.

Total investment in Chirpify stands at more than $7 million.

The funding was led by Voyager Capital and included contributions from Saturn Venture Partners, Provenance Ventures, and angel investor Idan Ravin.

Prominent customers of Chirpify’s service include Puma, Adidas, the Portland Trailblazers, and recently, MasterCard‘s charity arm.

“Brands are advertising everywhere,” Chirpify founder Chris Teso told Bank Innovation. “And social media is the conversion point.”

How is it going to work asking users to move from medium to another to make a purchase? “Worlds are melding,” Teso said. “The TV is becoming a computer monitor. And the second screen — over 50% of people watching TV are also on their tablet or phone.” And as we know, a huge amount of the time spent on mobile devices is spent on social media.

Because mobile is huge for social media, it’s also huge for Chirpify. The company is betting that game and concert attendees will have their smartphones handy, and that those watching TV at home will also have a mobile device at the ready for that impulse buy.

“With social media there is no need to download a second app,” Teso said. “People are already on Facebook and Twitter, so it’s simple to leverage existing behavior.”

The company will be “anywhere that there is advertising. There’s no need for change in brands’ behavior.”

According to Teso, the social media brands have no problem with Chirpify’s behavior even though in a sense the company is competing with each of their ad platforms. “Chirpify keeps people in Twitter rather than sending them to another site. It keeps eyeballs on Twitter.”

Chirpify uses its own payments platform and demands little of the social media networks beyond the use of their APIs.

Though it depends on social media for conversions, Chirpify no longer considers itself a social media advertising company. Teso described the new Chirpily in this way: “We’re entirely focused on enterprise brands. We’re about converting advertising. We’re not an e-commerce or social commerce company.” Chirpify’s business now is “cross-channel ad conversion,” Teso said.

Teso obviously has his eye on the social selling space and sees a bright future for social-based commerce. “All the social platforms are becoming ad platforms.” Beyond that the social media space itself is expanding and transforming. From Wanelo to Ketchup to SnapChat, social is becoming an integral way of how we use our mobile devices to connect.

As to Chirpify’s future, Teso said the company is considering moving to several social platforms on which it does not currently operate, but did not disclose which. YouTube and Tumblr are clear front runners with established user bases, but Chirpify is looking beyond the obvious.

“We’ll go to wherever advertising lives, whichever [platforms] our brands are paying attention to,” he said.