Nick D'Aloisio, the teenager who sold his start-up Summly to Yahoo! for an estimated $30m, has made his first investment since then, putting his money into Sweden's Tictail.
The Stockholm-based start-up has raised $8m in Series A funding from a wide range of investors including Mr D'Aloisio and Thrive Capital, the four-year-old venture capital firm known for its investments in Instagram and Kickstarter.
Tictail allows anybody to start up an online store in a matter of minutes to sell their products and has more than 35,000 active stores in 110 countries. Founded just three years ago, it has become one of the buzz companies in a Stockholm tech scene led by the likes of Spotify and Klarna.
"It's a very exciting milestone," Carl Waldekranz, Tictail chief executive and co-founder, told the Financial Times. He added that Tictail was aiming to have 100,000 stores by the end of the year as it puts to work the $10m it has raised so far.
Mr D'Aloisio, who could not be reached for comment, pocketed an estimated $10m last year when aged just 17 from the sale of his app that summarised news stories into more browsable "snapshots". He told the FT earlier this year that he had yet to touch the capital from the sale and put most of his salary from Yahoo!, where he works as a product manager, into a savings account.
Mr Waldekranz said of Mr D'Aloisio: "Nick is a fantastic guy and he's a friend of mine. I'm super happy to have him and the other investors on board. We scoped them out. We wanted to gather a group of people that are very passionate about product . . . and make a company really for the long term."
Like Mr D'Aloisio, Mr Waldekranz started his first business as a teenager, setting up what he calls a "boutique design agency" aged 19. He sold Super Strikes, which counted Spotify among its clients, when he was 23 before setting up Tictail.
Tictail is using the money raised to make a big push into the US, already one of its biggest markets alongside the UK, Sweden, France and Germany. It will open an office in New York to help with marketing to budding US online retailers.
Mr Waldekranz said it was also planning to focus more on the end consumer and provide an easier way to browse the products in all the stores it hosts as well as interact with the sellers behind them.
Tictail, which mostly relies on recommendations from existing users for growth, uses a simple interface similar to Tumblr, a blogging site, and the initial service is free. It makes money from additional services such as sending out discount vouchers or reminding customers when a product is back in stock.
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