Startup game tight (Photo: @KanyeWest)

Earlier today, New York City startup The Fancy* emailed Betabeat to let us know that "One of our favorite users stopped by the office today :)." Oh, yes we'd noticed. And retweeted.

We've documented Kanye West's interest in The Fancy--a fast-growing startup that turns posted photos into a consumerist's dream--before. But what exactly was Yeezy doing palling around the office?

"He gave some advice to our CEO Joe Einhorn, who looks up to Kanye the way most tech folks idolize Steve Jobs," the company replied. "It's all about building the future of commerce. Social, mobile, swag." Funny, we always thought it was social, mobile, local.

Mark Zuckerberg himself is a Fancy user, but the startup's members also includes Nas (who has posted 33 photos of must-have items like a magnetic floating bed and his own album) and Rick Ross.

Makes sense, we guess. After all, this is practically Startupland's theme song:

*Disclosure

Betabeat obtained what appear to be screenshots from The Fancy for Flipboard, which has not been released. Flipboard allegedly commissioned the app in January, according to a source, and would have been The Fancy's first API customer. The source speculated that Flipboard prioritized its Pinterest integration first. (Pinterest is a The Fancy competitor.)

Flipboard may still be planning to introduce The Fancy integration. We've reached out to Fancy and Flipboard for comment and will update if we hear back. (UPDATE: Joe Einhorn of The Fancy declined to comment on Flipboard, but he said The Fancy does have an API and is working with partners. Said Flipboard: "We think the Fancy is doing great work and hope to work with them at some time. We are heads down right now with several new  additions to Flipboard.") In the meantime, check out what The Fancy on Flipboard would have, or will eventually, look like.

Yeezy sold separately.

The last time we checked in with social commerce startup Fancy was back in February, around the time Kanye West tweeted out his approval for "My friend Joseph's site." The Joseph in question is ThingD founder Joe Einhorn, the wunderkind entrepreneur trying to create "the Facebook of stuff" as Ben Popper wrote in a profile of Mr. Einhorn in The Observer in 2010. (Somewhere along the way, The Fancy opted to drop the "The.")

Like Pinterest, Fancy is focused on discovering and collecting images of things. Unlike Pinterest, which relies on affiliate marketing links, anything on Fancy can be bought. You "fancy" a thing and Fancy lets brands and retailers sign up to sell that item on the site. That photo of the Eiffel Tower, for example, comes attached to a deal for hotel nights in Paris.

This novel approach seems to be gaining traction. In the past couple months, GigaOm reports that Fancy has doubled its users to 500,000. It has also enabled 500,000 offers, as well, all the way up to a $10,000 watch. Yesterday, Fancy launched on Android mobile devices. True to its name, Fancy has already inked deals to help power social commerce on the brand sites for Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent.

(Fancy is likewise chichi in its investor roster: parent company ThingD has raised $18 million from Marc Andreessen, Allen & Co and Gucci-owner PPR. And Jack Dorsey sits on the company's board as does PPR chairman Francois-Henri Pinault, otherwise known as Salma Hayek's baby daddy.)

The only potential downside of the popularity of Fancy's "let brands come to you" approach was buried in the end of GigaOm's post: "[Fancy is] demonstrating real progress with its model and in the process showing Pinterest how to make money through social discovery." Hmm, isn't that something Mr. Einhorn would rather Pinterest not learn?

Merchants need to claim items already posted on the Fancy site in order to sell there. Right now, the startup will only accept one merchant per item. Eventually, like Google, it will list many merchants who sell an item. If no merchant claims an item, users still need to travel to a third-party site in order to make the purchase.

Joe Einhorn launched The Fancy in 2011. High profile backers include Ashton Kutcher and Twitter's Jack Dorsey sits on its board. Until today, though, it was a lesser-known Pinterest competitor and like that site unprofitable. Business Insider, however, says The Fancy's users are "highly engaged" and the site is more "male-focused" than Pinterest.

The Fancy is doubling down on becoming profitable by also allowing users to plan vacations there. Based on images of vacation destinations site users can book hotel rooms, even making group deals at a discount.

In an interview for GigaOM, Mr. Einhorn told blogger Ryan Kim that he intends The Fancy to "turn commerce on its head."

"Up until now buyers for specific stores and different websites tell us what we’re allowed to buy, how much it costs and when we’re allowed to buy. In this case, we’re going to fancy the product or hotels that interest us and we’re going to let the owners or brands or merchants come to us with the appropriate offer," he said.

Another reason Pinterest should watch its back in the dog-eat-dog world of image curation and monetization--The Fancy has Kanye on its side:

My friend Joseph's site is really dope...thefancy.com

— Kanye West (@kanyewest) February 20, 2012

Gucci on The Fancy

When we first wrote about Joe Einhorn’s company, thingd, it was mostly flying below the radar, and surprised the blogosphere with its all star cast of investors and board members. This week, Betabeat has learned, Mr. Einhorn will be surprising the NY tech scene a second time. The Fancy, one of the consumer facing projects under the thingd umbrella, has secured a $10 million round of financing at a valuation north of $100 million.

Interestingly, the big bucks don’t come from a typical venture investor, but from a new lead investor PPR, the $16 billion French multi-national run by Francois Henri-Pinault, which owns the globe’s biggest fashion brands, including Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. PPR has earned a reputation for its smart, aggressive acquisition strategy and saw its stock jump after an impressive third quarter, but is little known in the tech world.

Why the big interest from the world of high fashion? The Fancy is part of a new breed of startups that encourage users to clip and share their favorite images from the web. Tumblr is the originator of this behavior, and generated a lot of interest among big fashion brands. Pinterest, which just raised a large round of its own, was the evolution of this business to a much more product-focused service.

Like both these sites, the Fancy is about visual discovery and has become a natural home for fashion brands, which see a high level of engagement from tastemakers around their goods. Clicking around the site a bit, we discovered that Mr. Pinault, husband of Salma Hayek, is quite the active user himself. You can see how the site showcases fashion goods, and easily imagine how it might work for fine art, since Mr. Pinault also owns a majority stake in Christie's auction house.

What makes The Fancy different is that it did not begin as a blogging platform like Tumblr or a bookmarking tool like Pinterest, but as an extension of Mr. Einhorn’s ambitious project to create the web’s best database of “things”. If Facebook is the social layer on the web, thingd aims to be the object layer, the platform that identifies images and collects metadata around everything from Gucci sunglasses to comic book collectibles.

The Fancy is a slick-looking product, not surprising considering that design guru Jack Dorsey is on the board. And like its peers, the site generates a ton of user activity, with some items collecting thousands of “fancies” and hundreds of comments.

But PPR likely chose The Fancy to partner with over more established competitors like Pinterest and Tumblr because of the backend. Semil Shah, writing in TechCrunch about this new class of startups, noted that Pinterest will monetize by driving traffic to shopping sites and collecting affiliate fees. Farther down the road, it may attempt to enable the “internet of things” by matching pictures taken offline to items in user online collections. But, said Mr. Shah, “My suspicion is that Pinterest will focus entirely on product for some time. Any site like this has a long way to to go.”

In that respect, The Fancy has a big head start. Thingd was built from the ground up to enable exactly this kind of behavior and already has a massive dataset of hundreds of millions of objects that ties together their online images and their offline IDs. With under ten employees last we heard, The Fancy now has serious capital and the best brand partnerships a tech company could hope for. The world of fashion startups in New York just got a lot more interesting.