Zerply Raises $600K Seed Round

    Zerply has announced it has raised €600 000 (€456 000) to expand their development team and establish an office in Tallinn, Estonia. Investors in the round include Dave McClure / 500 Startups, Quotidan Ventures, EchoVC, and others. With the funding round, Zerply is also launching Zerply Converse, a conversation tool, and two new integrations where you can show off your skills.

    Zerply operates on the idea that while resumes might still be the credentials of choice for fortune 500 companies, the creative class are better served through portfolios that demonstrate their talents. Online there’s not a great place to go, and certainly LinkedIn’s format doesn’t best express a designer’s talents.

    Their portfolio-driven network allows a person’s skills to be viewed first-hand and have their reputation validated by others through endorsements. Users can show off their work though Behance, Flickr, or Vimeo (among others), while also sharing off their accomplishments with endorsed tags and skills.

    Rather than taking the angle of “who has this person worked for,” Zerply is shooting more for the angle of “what can this person do for our company,” and is built to be a discovery platform — another large separation from LinkedIn’s closed “six degrees of separation” angle.

    Zerply is meant to work for designers, engineers, writers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and others. So far the site has gathered 60 000 users, and points out that the creative class makes up around a third of the U.S. workforce by their estimations.

    The company is also proud to show that a head of state has joined their network. The man needs no introduction, but the Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who we’ve seen really embrace Estonian startups, has a profile on Zerply. For perhaps a more filled in profile, you should check out co-founder Justin Style’s profile.