Everything we know so far about Verishop, former Snap chief strategy officer Imran Khan's new e-commerce startup that aims to take on Amazon
- Former Snap chief strategy officer Imran Khan's new company will be called Verishop, he announced in a Medium post Monday.
- It aims to create an online retailer that serves customers and brands better than existing e-commerce alternatives.
- Verishop has signed partnership deals with a number of brands, Business Insider has learned.
Former Snap chief strategy officer Imran Khan's new e-commerce company has a name, Verishop, the startup announced in a Medium post Monday.
The new venture is "a new kind of online-shopping company," and its aim is to "create an online retailer that better serves both customers and brands."
Read More: Snap's former chief strategy officer, Imran Khan, makes a key hire for his online-shopping startup
Khan is trying to build an alternative to Amazon or Jet for brands to sell their goods, with a focus on particular product categories, Recode has reported.
E-commerce has made shopping more efficient, but in doing so, has "lost much of the joy" of discovery, according to the post. Verishop hopes to bring that joy back to online shopping, at scale and with the ease of online purchasing and fast delivery that consumers have come to expect.
The company also seeks to elevate brands' identities while helping them reach millennial shoppers. Verishop claims it will not ask brands to pay for better placement or leave brands to battle unvetted third-party sellers and counterfeit products, as other e-commerce platforms do.
Verishop has signed partnerships with a number of brands already, Business Insider has learned, including beauty brands Ursa Major and Indie Lee, home goods brands such as Primary Goods and Indego Africa and fashion brands including IRO and Finders Keepers.
In addition to Imran Khan, Verishop's leadership includes his wife, co-founder and chief strategy officer Cate Khan, who spent eight years at Amazon, where she was most recently SVP of retail for the Quidsi business.
The startup also recently hired talent agent Paul Cazers as its vice president of strategic partnerships, as Business Insider first reported, and named Mark Schwartz, Goldman Sachs' former Asia-Pacific chairman and a WeWork board member, to its board.
Other recent hires include Jason Bosco, Dollar Shave Club's vice president of engineering, who was tapped in November to run engineering. The startup's headcount is about 20.
Khan sees social-media influencers, in addition to Google, as being an important source of traffic to the platform. Cazers' role will be to build partnerships with influencers and brands, including direct-to-consumer ones, a source familiar with the plans told Business Insider last week.
Khan raised $17.5 million for the startup, with Lightspeed Venture Partners as the lead investor, in November.