The Luupe, the one-stop production marketplace helping brands connect with a curated community of women photographers and diverse creators all over the world, today announced that they have raised $3M in seed investment funding. The round was led by Wave, with participation from Jenny Lefcourt, General Partner at Freestyle. Prior participation included strategic angels such as Tracy Kim, Former CEO of Aaptiv & Chief of Staff at Shutterstock; Jody Vandergriff, CEO at Seeker, Founder & CEO at WebDAM (Acquired by Shutterstock); and Lee Torrens, early employee at Canva.

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The Luupe’s mission is to help creators generate income. As a dual sided marketplace, sophisticated brands have access to a burgeoning group of women and non-binary photographers for work. In turn, photographers provide authentic visuals for brands that reflect the customers of today. In addition to the marketplace, The Luupe provides photographers with opportunities to network with each other, share technical tips, negotiation strategies, portfolio reviews, job opportunities, and use their blog to tell or share stories on women and visual culture.

Creator marketplaces like The Luupe will play a major role for brands actively seeking resources to capture the diversity of their customer. Brands including Sweetgreen, Sierra Club, and GoHenry are active brands on the platform expanding and diversifying their content to successfully evolve with consumer expectations. Today, customers expect their chosen brands to recognize their potential as impactful cultural entities across marketing and product, and use their influence to speak out on important causes. The Luupe helps brands achieve this impact and provides photographers with an unrivalled opportunity to generate income.

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“We are seeing an influx of brands using The Luupe’s marketplace to source globally diverse content that resonates with their wide ranging audience,” says Keren Sachs, CEO & Founder of The Luupe. “The future of brand trust will heavily rely on visuals that capture how we live and relate to one another and we’re excited to further build on this mission and become the one-stop-shop for brand and creator workflows,” says Sachs.

This latest round of funding will go towards hiring across marketing, sales and engineering in the next six months as the team further builds and scales workflow features within the marketplace.

“At Wave, we specialize in investing in marketplace companies, which are fundamentally about connecting people,” says Sara Adler, General Partner at Wave Capital. “We are interested in companies like The Luupe, which identify a particular need and address it. The Luupe is the epitome of a marketplace or community – bringing together creators and brands all over the globe and providing them with the needed network for success. ”

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