For a company whose ambition it is to ensure that “eventually – you wont visit a retailer site”, you may be surprised to see the long list of high street names already involved with SHAREIGHT, even at this, ahem, ‘pre-revenue’ stage.

The smartphone-first shopping service has clients including the likes of John Lewis, Topman and B&Q, and investors are likewise queueing up.

This is Londons largest ever crowdfunded round and it all happened in a record 24 hours on Seedrs. After smashing an initial target of £350,000 in 17 hours, the company reopened the round and quickly hit the symbolic $1m mark. The UK-based startup has given away 17.05 per cent of its company to 263 investors in exchange for £623,290.

So whats the big deal?

The app helps time-poor mobile browsers by bringing together a curated selection of eight products for sale from across the web. Shoppers can easily compare items and then quickly buy, save or share the list. Having worked closely with its partners when accessing and using their data, the company now has the top 500 retailer search terms available to its users in just three taps.

SHAREIGHT had a pre-money valuation of £3m, but serial entrepreneur and CEO Grant Slatter admits that valuing a startup is a rather tricky business. Although the team had gone to a number of investors pre-raise, he says people got in very fast and were staking much bigger sums than normal for Seedrs campaigns:

“People are investing in the future opportunity, plus the team and their ability to deliver on that. Around 10 per cent of the investors we actually knew – but we were literally inundated.”

By comparison, the previous record raise on Seedrs – except for its own funding round –was £300,000 and took weeks, not hours, despite a national publicity campaign.

Android and payments on the way

He explains that the company is still focused on growing the product range, adding Android to its armoury this summer, and on building relationships with more retailers. SHAREIGHT already takes in product feeds from some 90 stores – many of whom have legacy eCommerce infrastructure with data that isnt easy to transfer into the mobile world. “We reorder over 1m products to our taxonomy on a more than daily basis – today, that process takes a lot of manual work.

“We’re not actually scaling [users] at this stage,” he says. “A key focus is working out how we acquire users and then how we retain them – until youve got that nailed, you dont want to scale.” Like most of digital’s big success stories, think Uber, Dropbox and LoveFilm, by the summer, SHAREIGHT will be rolling out a ‘fantastic’ referral programme this summer. “Incentivised referrals gives people a chance to change their behaviour – they might as well give it a go – so it’s an opportunity to reach an audience, but the only way change behaviour is your product delivering,” Slatter says.

The company is also bravely forging its way into providing ‘ultra-simple’, one-tap payments, partnering with an as-yet unnamed ‘global payments processor’ to deliver this, also due to go live in the summer. Plus, the app has a built-in WhatsApp-style chat function for shoppers who want a second opinion on their potential purchases. “Dont think of us as an app,” Slatter says. “Dont think of us as ecommerce solution put on a phone. We’re the new retail internet.”

Ok, so what is it?

Its got notes of a number of online shopping services, so is SHAREIGHT an Amazon-style aggregator, a Google-esque engine, or is it really something else? “Our customer is someone whos frustrated with shopping experience on smartphone – they would like to shop on mobile but can’t. Google will always direct you to individual sites and we’re saving the pain of having to do this. Comparing on a smartphone is also almost impossible, even if the sites are optimised, so we know smartphone users need a different navigation method. SHAREIGHT means you dont need to learn 20 different apps or interfaces.”

So should retailers be worried? “They attract their own customers directly and they’re very successful at doing that,” Slatter explains. And what about imitators? Slatter says he is confident that the company’s relationships with brands, as well as the product organisation structure, is something that would take months to replicate.

And his confidence is not unfounded, if previous form is anything to go by. His last venture Star Trainer Pro became the top fitness app in 39 countries, without spending a penny on marketing. SHAREIGHT too has big global ambitions. “The software allows us to scale into other markets very quickly. Were not a copycat and were not trying to create a little business here. We want to change the way we access things on a smartphone.”

Working out of Club Workspace in Oval – the Oval Office – SHAREIGHT are currently 18 people and the company is looking to bring on more. “We really are a mobile-first business. But by that I mean we’re designing from the smartphone up. Retailers have found that trying to put everything on this website onto a small screen isnt working. However close your laptop is, your phone is closer. We decided we wanted to win on the device thats closest to you.”

Can 263 investors, the UKs biggest brands and a team of dedicted innovators all be wrong?