Online marketplace, Cirqls.com, one of six tech start-ups in Seed Engine’s first business accelerator programme provides a safe and trustful product buying environment and a personalised shopping experience for customers.
The platform enables retailers to set up storefronts in a quick and easy way and engage with their customers and followers, reach a bigger market and manage their orders and payments in a convenient way.
It’s a new channel of e-commerce connecting buyers and sellers via their social circles permitting users to identify the items they like, specifying their interests and based on that information creating a personalised shopping experience where they can make confident buying decisions. The Trust-O-Meter algorithm, developed by Cirqls.com, calculates the trust level between two parties and takes into account multiple factors such as social presence, degree of separation between two users, identity verification and other elements.
Founders Mark Karimov (CEO) and Donovan Solms (CTO) both hail from tech backgrounds, having previously worked for a mobile marketing company where they built high-load distributed messaging systems, submitting more than 120 million MMS messages to mobile phones in the course of one year and compelling some mobile networks to upgrade their servers to handle the pressure their systems were putting on load-balancers.
Both have also previously been involved in start-ups, locally and internationally, working with multi-touch technologies and mobile solutions.
To date the duo has relied solely on the R100 000 initial funding provided by Seed Engine in order to launch.
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“Seed Engine is an incredible high-pressure business accelerator”, says Mark Karimov. “In three months they load you with intensive knowledge not available under other programmes, and the involvement of coaches and mentors is a big advantage. It’s real stuff – it’s not just about studying theory and thinking you know how business works. Everything is field-proof and tested by you personally in the real world. It’s a fantastic experience.”
