Lisbon, Portugal · Startup Bloop is a Lisbon-based social-commerce startup founded by Francisco Rodrigues (CEO) and João Neves (CTO), both alumni of companies including Amazon, Farfetch, Microsoft and Uber. Conceived in 2022 and formalised in 2024, it operates what it calls the world's first social shopping network — a platform that fuses a product marketplace with the mechanics of a social feed, turning ordinary consumers into paid recommenders.
Users earn wallet credits of up to 10% of a purchase's value for publishing authentic recommendations, and up to 5% commission on referral sales, while sellers gain community-generated exposure instead of paid ads. At its July 2025 public beta the platform carried 200,000+ products from 150+ brands and reported a ~4.5% conversion rate. Bloop has raised about €1.5M in pre-seed capital co-led by Monarque Funds and Insure Broker, including one of Portugal's largest retail crowdfunding rounds, and targeted a €5M seed to expand into Spain and France.
Hamburg, Germany · Event OMR runs satellite late-session events through the summer in Hamburg following the main May festival. The July edition focuses on AI in marketing, social commerce, and creator-economy monetization with smaller, more intimate audiences than the main event. Tickets from EUR 50.
Tbilisi, Georgia · Startup Phubber is a Tbilisi-based fashion re-commerce marketplace that combines the feed-driven social-shopping pattern popularized by Depop and Vinted with a mixed C2C and small-B2C inventory model tuned for the Caucasus. Buyers browse a scrollable, algorithmically ranked feed of pre-loved and indie-brand apparel; sellers can list in minutes with photos taken directly from the app; and the platform handles payments, local delivery integration, return flows, and dispute mediation so that trust — the usual blocker in peer-to-peer fashion — is not the user's problem. Phubber emerged as a breakout from the 500 Georgia/Eurasia program and is one of the more visible consumer-marketplace experiments coming out of Georgia, where most local tech is still B2B and fintech. It is a useful data point on how social-commerce patterns originally built for Western Gen-Z audiences are being re-implemented for emerging regional markets.