CBA invests in media crowdsourcing startup SpringLeap

New York headquartered SpringLeap raised an undisclosed funding amount from Cross Border Angels (CBA), the investment vehicle of San Francisco headquartered Scaale Group. CBA was joined, in the current round, by few other investors from the Valley such as ex-COO Facebook, Head of Operations at Twitter and Zazzle, 37Angels and Angela Raitzin.

Springleap is a marketplace of vetted creative professionals with agency experience. Brands and agencies use Springleap to predict the success of their creative and marketing assets, get actionable feedback to improve their ROI, discover emerging trends and competitive brand positioning. They also provide a non-spec crowdsourcing model to source solutions to creative briefs at agency quality.

Described by one of the leading VCs as the largest agency for agencies and brands in the world to cocreate, it has a community of professional creative people with different skill sets and knowledge of different markets and geographies. The strength of the community is 180k+ creative audience globally.

Listed recently as the 7th most innovative company in the world by Fast Company, it has touched over $100K in monthly revenue and has worked with some of the marquee clients such as Nestle, Unilever, Vodafone, Bacardi, WPP, Samsung, Weebly, Commonbond, Universal Music, Adidas, Nokia among other Fortune 500 companies.

“While crowdsourcing based business models have begun to pick up lately, the creative space is yet to see a product based on this concept. This gap is plugged by Springleap as it provides market validation for an advertising campaign, even before a brand launches it, by harnessing the power of crowd,” said Ashwin Sanzgiri, Vice President - Capital Group, Scaale.

The company would be utilising the funds raised through CBA primarily for product development, marketing and driving sales. As per Eran Eyal, Founder & CEO, “Our vision is be the industry utility to check any creative before it goes live – offering quick delivery on actionable insights from local agency-class creatives who have worked on hundereds of campaigns to drive a higher ROI. Before you launch your social media, apps, ads, graphic design or packaging – wouldn’t you love to access those local creatives that have worked on hundreds of campaigns to tell you how to improve your creative with local knowledge? You can also access them to source solutions for your creative briefs.”

Started in September 2012, Springleap had raised about $1.1 million till date from several Silicon Valley angels, seed funds including Colenso Capital, Crystal Bay Capital, 3GP Consortium & like. Springleap is looking to raise a Series A through international investors to open up markets of USA, Mumbai, Singapore and Hong Kong.

CBA, the investment arm of Scaale Group specifically looks at investing in cross border ventures which have a significant potential to scale up globally. Some of the investors of the vehicle include Kaushal Chokshi, Chairman - Scaale Group, Pankaj Krishna, Founder - Chrome DM, Rohit Gupta – Founder FineLine Pvt Ltd., David Costa - Ever is UK Head, amongst others. The objective of the investments is to infuse smart capital in a venture where international investors strategically mentor innovative startups for a global play.

CBA will actively support its portfolio companies in becoming truly global and creating value towards a successful exit via its unique mix of global investors with industry expertise, strong access and connects with the local market. This is the first in a series of funds to be launched by CBA in the coming year.