By Jacques Coetzee: staff reporter, Ventureburn
South African crowdsource design startup Springleap has just announced that it has secured a seed round of US$400 000 (R4.1-million) from a mix of South African and British Angel Investors including Colenso Capital, Clearwater, Kevin Gaskell and Crystal Bay Capital.
Chairman of Springleap advisory board Kevin Gaskell, who is also the former MD of Porsche and BMW, boasts that “the team at Springleap had gained significant traction in a short amount of time with Fortune 500 brands and have a big vision to empower the creative industry.”
The investment will be used to help fuel expansion throughout Africa and beyond. “With our investors’ support, we can now focus on building more innovative models for our agency and brand clients to work with our community of pan-African and global creatives.” says Springleap CEO Eran Eyal.
The seven-year old company from Cape Town, South Africa started out as a crowdsourced platform for T-shirt designs, but eventually pivoted into a conduit for clients to access thousands of creatives for design, creative research and co-creation projects.
With local and international clients such as Samsung, SAB, Nestle, Kraft, and Ogilvy, the creative startup has become a curated agency-class creative crowdsourcing for brands and agencies.
“The model Springleap is developing can sit at the heart of any agency to help them flexibly scale and access new varieties of talent and skills across Africa”, comments Clearwater CEO Derek White.
“There is a massive gap in the brands and agencies market (estimated to be worth around US$580-billion a year) for a model that is managed, curated, bespoke to the project and not limited to traditional staffing models.” says Peter Binks, Managing Director of Crystal Bay Capital
“Springleap aspires to become South Africa’s latest startup success story in the making”, says Eyal, “Securing the first round of funding puts us on the fast track to keeping the spotlight on the innovation coming out of this corner of the world.”
The startup was also the recent winner of the MentorCamp finals in Canada and was announced as runner up in the Innovation 100 Awards held in California against the likes of Amazon, eBay and the Apple Store.
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This post first appeared here on Ventureburn.com, our Africa publishing partner.