GIST the social network built around what you and your friends buy, closes $1M in angel financing, led by the Kleiner Perkins and Accel Scout Funds. With COVID-19 pushing out in-person exchanges at brick-and-mortar stores and social gatherings, GIST innovatively brings product recommendations online to where consumers are now shopping.

“E-commerce has a trust problem,” said Walter Haas, CEO and founder of GIST, “which is why everything on GIST is a real purchase.” Better than generic review sites or sponsored Instagram posts, everything you see on GIST comes from verified purchase data curated by friends in your social network. This fulfills the need for personal recommendations by telling you what friends own before you hit the “buy” button.

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Connecting people and their real purchase history brings trust to online product discovery:

With GIST’s frictionless product capture technology, the app automatically makes a visual, sortable purchase history from your online and brick-and-mortar transactions. Unlike Pinterest, every post on GIST is shoppable and doesn’t require manually copying websites to share. The company’s focus on trust extends to its business model and privacy-first ethos: GIST does not make money selling user data or advertising, allowing everything to be 100% private by default.

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Why now?

Consumers searching for a product online often must sort through thousands of unfamiliar brands and dubious reviews from strangers, which can result in indecision or choice paralysis. To solve this problem, GIST offers its users credible curation from trusted sources — the people you know — bringing a human connection to the cold, impersonal world of e-commerce.

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