The Fancy gets $53 million from AmEx and Will Smith

Social shopping website now reportedly valued at $600 million

Social shopping website the Fancy, a rival of Pinterest, has just raised a big new round, giving the company a huge new valuation as well.

The Fancy has raised a new round worth $53 million, from Investors that reportedly included American Express, billionaire Len Blavatnik and Will Smith, according to a report from Bloomberg late Sunday. 

The new round has valued the company at $600 million, sources said. Vator has reached out to The Fancy for confirmation of this report, as well at the new valuation, and we will update if we learn more.

The Fancy had previously raised $18 million from the likes of such big names as Jack Dorsey, Esther Dyson, Celtics owner Jim Pallotta, Maynard Webb, Chris Hughes, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz, as well as VC firm General Catalyst Partners and investment bank Allen & Company.  Francois-Henri Pinault’s PPR, which owns such brands as Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci, and Gerard-Perregaux, invested $10 million into The Fancy in 2011, which reportedly boosted The Fancy’s value to $100 million.

Most recently the company raised $26 million in equity financing in October 2012. The new money will be used to continue the company's expansion.

In addition to the funding news, it looks like the Fancy is also getting a new board member: Edward Gilligan, the president of American Express. He joins Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Francois-Henri Pinault, chairman of Kering.

The Fancy originally got its start as Thing Daemon in 2010, when CEO and co-founder Joe Einhorn started the company as a database of things.  In February 2012, the company honed in on e-commerce and launched the Fancy engine.

VatorNews reporter Faith Merino previously called the Fancy “essentially a reconfigured Pinterest with a stronger e-commerce foundation.”

Users are able to upload and share images of cool items, and “fancy” those items that they want.  It is different from Pinterest in that its users’ have the ability to purchase items directly from the site. 

The company is now taking in about $3 million in revenue each month, sources told Bloomberg.

The Fancy is one of many companies that hoped onto the Pinterest bandwagon, including smaller companies like Snip.it, which  redesigned its website and mobile version to look like Pinterest, and the Wanderful, a Pinterest for local papers.

Even some of the biggest web properties started to rip-off Pinterest, like Facebook, which added a new feature called Collections, where users can add products they want to a wishlist, and eBay, which redesigned its website to look like Pinterest, allowing its users to curate items and put them into a personalized homepage feed.

(Image source: https://www.fancy.com)