Snap Alums Launch Trust, Raise $9 Million to Make Advertising More Accessible

Bernard MendezBernard Mendez is an editorial intern at dot.LA. He attends UCLA, where he is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics. Mendez was previously an editor at the Daily Bruin, the student newspaper at UCLA. While working as a marketing executive at Snapchat, James Borow saw small businesses had a harder time competing with larger companies when it came to advertising. He and a group of Snap employees had the idea to start Trust, a company aiming to make the advertising process friendlier for smaller ecommerce companies and direct-to-consumer brands.”We kept hearing from small businesses [saying] ‘it’s really hard to compete against the big guys, unless you have an inside track or unless you have a lot of capital,” said Borow, the CEO and co-founder of Trust. “That’s really where we had the idea of: what if we could flip it on its head and have all these businesses help one another so they can actually go ahead and compete?”The Santa Monica-based startup raised $9 million in a round of seed funding, the company announced Wednesday. The round was led by Lerer Hippeau, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures and Upper90.Trust gives companies a card through Stripe that increases its…
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