Social inspiration sharing site Piccing expands to SA, ready to dominate space

Piccing is on to great things. The “social picture and inspiration sharing platform”, as it calls itself, is enjoying rapid growth in user-base, unique visitors to its site, and just secured extra funding. The cherry on top is expansion into South Africa, with a new programming and content development office setting up in Cape Town, South Africa.

The web-startup was founded in March 2011 in Palo Alto, California, by European internet entrepreneurs Dirk Spielmann (Zurich, Switzerland), and Nikolaj Zethraeus (Malmö, Sweden), with the help of publisher and trend scout Peter Wolf.

Piccing is essentially part Evernote, part Pinterest. The site allows you to discover and share your favourite pictures on the web, and display them on your own “Piccboard.” The idea is to exchange inspiration and meet like-minded individuals who might share your tastes.

Piccing’s user base is mostly in Europe and the United States, and the site claims to have more than 1.2-million unique monthly vistors. It just secured what it calls “substantial” Round A funding, although the exact amount has not been disclosed as yet.

This comes after two successful seed rounds, and will primarily drive the expansion into Cape Town. For Piccing, Cape Town is a buzzing city, and the startup has identified it as a developing hub for web-startups.

Piccing feels it is well-poised to be a “game-changer” in the social ecommerce space, and is readying itself against sites like Pinterest, by making multiple enhancements to its website and apps which will improve both functionality and user experience.

One such enhancement will be a curated blog on design, gadgets and lifestyle. Piccing is definitely a startup to watch as it continues expansion, and its next few moves could well determine how it holds up, and differentiates itself, in the social ecommerce market.