Sharetribe picks up $1 million from Lifeline & Reaktor

    Over Slush, Sharetribe announced that they’ve picked up a solid $1 million from Finnish kingmaker VC Lifeline Ventures, Reaktor and Tekes giving them good cash to support their platform which allows anyone to run peer-to-peer marketplaces for buying, selling, or renting goods.The company’s platform has seen good growth lately, used from everything from peer-to-peer surfboard rentals to helping find caretakers for pets. Previoulsy Sharetribe raised money from Reaktor Polte and Tekes, the Finnish government funding agency.

    “We’re invoking the spirit of Airbnb and Etsy, but creating something unique by allowing our users to build their own individual peer-to-peer marketplace services” says Sharetribe CEO Juho Makkonen.

    The company’s founders have been working in this space since 2008, but seem to have finally found their niche after starting out as a craigslist for your neighborhood or organization (once called Kassi), and now finding their home as a marketplace for marketplaces. Their marketplaces have been used in more than 50 countries before fully opening up the platform.

    The result is something like the “sharing economy” but with a little more of a Nordic twist. “Imagine Uber owned by the drivers, or TaskRabbit owned by the rabbits. That would be a lot more sustainable and fair economy,” says Sharetribe CEO Juho Makkonen.

    There’s good logic to their growth though. It’s hard enough to populate a marketplace there should be a quick way to set one up and earn a little money off the commission, especially for non-programmers familiar with a niche. “The peer-to-peer online marketplace sector is growing fast, and Sharetribe is a frontrunner that we expect to become a global leader in this space” says Petteri Koponen, serial entrepreneur and partner at Lifeline Ventures.

    As an added bonus, here are some of the services running off of Sharetribe:

    – A nanny booking site, where families that have had great nannies but don’t need their services any more are looking to find a new “home” for the nanny. (US)
    – A site where you can find a local cable guy to mount your tv, fix your wifi, program universal remote or set up any other home electronics. (US)
    – A rental marketplace for farmers where they can rent things like tractors and caterpillars to each other (Canada)
    – A marketplace for finding great venues for professional photographers to shoot their pictures (US)
    – A “cakes on demand” marketplace where you can order a cake for your party from a local baking hobbyists (Germany)
    – A site for finding venue for a pop-up store in Milan (Italy)
    – A site to sell your old hockey equipment (sticks, skates, pads, etc) to other hockey enthusiasts (Switzerland)
    – A site where people who have too many apple trees can give them away to people if they come pick the apples up themselves (France)
    – A site for booking a paralegal (Australia)