Breef received funding from Greycroft worth $3.5M. The company wants to use it to continue developing “the world’s first online marketplace” for transactions between brands and agencies.
The investment round was led by Greycroft. It was also joined by Rackhouse Ventures, The House Fund, John and Helen McBain, Lance Armstrong, and 640 Oxford Ventures. The total funding of Breef up till now is $4.5M since its inception in 2019.
Reasons Breef received funding from Greycroft
It was founded by husband-and-wife co-founders George Raptis and Emily Bibb. Bibb had a background in digital marketing and brand building at companies like PopSugar. Whereas, Raptis was on the founding team at fintech company Credible.com. They both faced a lot of trouble finding agencies in the traditional ways of asking referrals and making multiple calls. Sometimes there is a demand for a huge workforce for a project. But not necessarily on a permanent basis. Therefore, Breef is taking the traditional freelance outsourcing project to a new level. According to Raptis, a traditional individual freelance project costs less than $1000 and takes a week on average. But, Breef is working with team-based projects averaging around $25000 for 6 months or so.
He further added that Breef’s platform is democratizing how brands and boutique agencies connect with each other in the process of planning, scoping, pitching, and paying for projects.
At the core, we are taking the agency online. We are building a platform to streamline a complicated process for outsourcing high-value work and allow users to find, pay for and work with agencies in days rather than months.
Emily Bibb , Co-founder – Breef
Business model of Breef
Brands can draft their own brief to articulate what they need. Then Breef connects them to a shortlist of agencies that match those requirements. Rather than a one- or two-month search, the company is able to bring that down to five days.
Bibb and Raptis decided to seek venture capital after experiencing demand. It is also getting immense business by shifting to the remote style of working. They saw many brands that may have originally utilized in-house teams or agencies of a record turn to distributed or smaller teams.
Due to the nature of agency work being expensive, Breef is processing large amounts of money over the internet. Hence, the founders want to continue developing the technology and team to make a secure and trustworthy system.
Performances and new services
A new service has been launched after Breef received funding from Greycroft. It is the buy now, pay later project funding service called Breef(pay). It streamlines payments to agencies and reduces cash flow challenges. Users can construct their own payment terms. They can mix up the way they are paid and utilize a credit line or defer payments to control external spending.
To date, Breef has more than 5,000 vetted boutique agencies in 20 countries on its platform. It has successfully been able to save its users an average of 32% in product costs compared with a traditional agency model. It boasts a customer list that includes Spotify, Brex, Shutterstock, Bluestone Lane, and Kinrgy.
Kevin Novak, the founder of Rackhouse Ventures, said he met Raptis through the Australian tech community. He recently launched his first fund targeting startups in novel applications of data.
Novak said, “When they were talking to me about what they wanted to do, I got intrigued”. He further added that he likes finding marketplaces where the idea is well understood by the people. Looking at the matching problem, Emily and George have found a unique way to find ad agencies that haven’t existed before.