Ufurnish.com, the online furniture sales platform founded by Irish businesswoman Deirdre McGettrick, has raised a further £3.4m in seed funding.
The round follows an earlier £1.8m pre-seed round in 2020.
Backers of the company include Tony Smurfit, CEO of paper and packaging giant Smurfit Kappa Group and Pat McCann, the founder of Dalata Hotel Group who is the chairman of ufurnish.com.
Also backing the venture are Amanda Burton, Portfolio non-executive director, Camelia Robu who is Head of Leveraged Finance EMEA at Macquarie Capital and Caroline Worboys, the founder of data company HDM Worboys.
"It is invaluable to be able to reach out and share challenges and opportunities from my business with my investors," Ms McGettrick said.
"Often given their experience, they have insights over and above what I might have considered."
The latest funding will be used to grow awareness of Ufurnish.com and to expand retail partnerships.
The platform brings together hundreds of thousands of products from over 100 of Britain's furniture retailers.
Ms McGettrick set it up after she became frustrated with the process of finding furniture for her own apartment.
"I found the experience very frustrating and disconnected," she said.
"Working long hours, the last thing I wanted to do in the evenings was trawl websites to find the right sofa or bedside cabinet, especially as I kept having to repeatedly input the same search criteria on every website."
"It was frustrating that the same retailers kept appearing in searches, but I wanted to search all furniture retailers."
The company already employs 18 people and has had over 8m page visits to its website.
