Berlin-based magazine building platform Styla has raised a €2.5m seed round led by Redalpine and joined by the UK’s Pentland Group, which is behind brands including Speedo, Hunters and Ted Baker.
The company, founded in 2012, offers easy digital magazine layout for non-developers, using algorithms to design the pages, plus ecommerce capabilities, making each page directly ‘shoppable’.
Styla already has clients like Grazia magazine’s Graziashop and says its platform leads to more than 35% higher conversion rates and sees an average time on site of 4.5 minutes.
Richard Hatfield, MD of Graziashop, said: “Using Styla’s beautiful layout and ecommerce service has added a stickiness to our site and helped define the storytelling of our brand. It’s the only product we’ve found that really brings the aesthetics of print magazines to the web.”
Pentland Group has already joined several other tech investment rounds, including in taxi app firm Kabbee, OrderWithMe and Housekeep.