Olsam raises $165M to buy up and scale consumer and B2B Amazon Marketplace sellers

On the heels of Heroes announcing a $200 million raise earlier today, to double down on buying and scaling third-party Amazon Marketplace sellers, another startup out of London aiming to do the same is announcing some significant funding of its own. Olsam, a roll-up play that is buying up both consumer and B2B merchants selling on Amazon by way of Amazon’s FBA fulfillment program, has closed $165 million — a combination of equity and debt that it will be using to fuel its M&A strategy, as well as continue building out its tech platform and to hire more talent.

Apeiron Investment Group — an investment firm started by German entrepreneur Christian Angermayer — led the Series A equity round, with Elevat3 Capital (another Angermayer firm that has a strategic partnership with Founders Fund and Peter Thiel) also participating. North Wall Capital was behind the debt portion of the deal. We have asked and Olsam is only disclosing the full amount raised, not the amount that was raised in equity versus debt. Valuation is also not being disclosed.

Being an Amazon roll-up startup from London that happens to be announcing a fundraise today is not the only thing that Olsam has in common with Heroes. Like Heroes, Olsam is also founded by brothers.

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Sam Horbye previously spent years working at Amazon, including building and managing the company’s business marketplace (the B2B version of the consumer marketplace); while co-founder Ollie Horbye had years of experience in strategic consulting and financial services.

Between them, they also built and sold previous marketplace businesses, and they believe that this collective experience gives Olsam — a portmanteau of their names, “Ollie” and “Sam” — a leg up when it comes to building relationships with merchants; identifying quality products (versus the vast seas of search results that often feel like they are selling the same inexpensive junk as each other); and understanding merchants’ challenges and opportunities, and building relationships with Amazon and understanding how the merchant ecosystem fits into the e-commerce giant’s wider strategy.

Olsam is also taking a slightly different approach when it comes to target companies, by focusing not just on the usual consumer play, but also on merchants selling to businesses. B2B selling is currently one of the fastest-growing segments in Amazon’s Marketplace, and it is also one of the more overlooked by consumers. “It’s flying under the radar,” Ollie said.

“The B2B opportunity is very exciting,” Sam added. “A growing number of merchants are selling office supplies or more random products to the B2B customer.”

Estimates vary when it comes to how many merchants there are selling on Amazon’s Marketplace globally, ranging anywhere from 6 million to nearly 10 million. Altogether those merchants generated $300 million in sales (gross merchandise value), and it’s growing by 50% each year at the moment.

And consolidating sellers — in order to achieve better economies of scale around supply chains, marketing tools and analytics, and more — is also big business. Olsam estimates that some $7 billion has been spent cumulatively on acquiring these businesses, and there are more out there: Olsam estimates there are some 3,000 businesses in the U.K. alone making more than $1 million each in sales on Amazon’s platform.

(And to be clear, there are a number of other roll-up startups beyond Heroes also eyeing up that opportunity. Raising hundreds of millions of dollars in aggregate, others that have made moves this year include Suma Brands [$150 million], Elevate Brands [$250 million], Perch [$775 million], factory14 [$200 million], Thrasio [currently probably the biggest of them all in terms of reach and money raised and ambitions], Heyday, The Razor Group, Branded, SellerX, Berlin Brands Group [X2], Benitago, Latin America’s Valoreo and Rainforest and Una Brands out of Asia.)

“The senior team behind Olsam is what makes this business truly unique,” said Angermayer in a statement. “Having all been successful in building and selling their own brands within the market and having worked for Amazon in their marketplace team – their understanding of this space is exceptional.”

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Cheeterz Club wants to make reading glasses hip

Can reading glasses actually be cool? A new eyewear company called Cheeterz Club thinks so. The startup is working to change the perception of reading glasses from being just cheap, disposable items you pick up from a rotating display rack at your local drug store to being something you’d actually be proud to wear. To do so, the company is designing its glasses with quality lenses and frames in range of styles, while still keeping the pricing affordable.

The startup — whose name is a reference to the slang term for glasses, “cheaters,” — was founded by Jennifer Farrelly, whose background includes work in advertising and sales at companies like Uber and Virool.

She said the idea to make a better set of readers came to her because she found herself frustrated by the current options on the market.

“It all started a few years ago. My friends were posting on social media these really depressing comments and posts like: ‘I’m old and turning into my parents, this is awful.’ And I [thought to myself] why does it have to be like that? I feel just as young today as I did ten years ago,” Farrelly explains. “Why are my friends and I feeling forced to feel old because of something that happens overnight?,” she says, of what felt like the sudden onset of middle age and the hardships it brings.

What’s worse, Farrelly says, is that when you finally make your way to the drugstore to pick out some reading glasses, all you’ll find are bad, plastic pairs that both look and feel cheap.

“That’s even more demoralizing,” she adds.

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So Farrelly teamed up with a former Warby Parker and Pair Eyewear Head of Product, Lee Zaro, to design a new line of more fashion-forward eyewear.

Zaro, who’s based in the L.A. area, immediately saw the opportunity.

“Drugstore reading glasses are typically poor in quality, and can feel like they are designed with our parents in mind, leaving a huge unmet need for sophisticated eyewear options,” he said. “When Jennifer approached me to help design her first line of eyewear, I knew it was a brilliant idea.”

To differentiate itself from lower-end readers, Cheeterz Club glasses are made with 100% acetate and feature spring hinges and stainless steel. The lenses, meanwhile, offer more clarity than is often found in reading glasses.

Image Credits: Cheeterz Club

Typically, ophthalmic plastic lens materials have an Abbe value — a measure of the degree at which light is dispersed or separated — between 30 and 58. The higher number offers better optical performance. Crown glass can have an Abbe value as high as 59, but polycarbonate readers (like those from Warby Parker, Farrelly notes) would have an Abbe value of 30. Cheeterz Club lenses, which are CR-39 lenses, are at at 58. This is a difference you can tell when trying the glasses on alongside your drugstore readers.

Cheeterz’ lenses also offer 100% UVA/UVB protection, and are oil and water repellent. They can optionally be bought in one of eight fashion tints, from pink to blue, or in two sun shades. Consumers can also opt to add Blue Light coating to help with screen-induced eye fatigue or they can choose Progressive lenses, which combine distance vision with a reading lens.

Tints are an extra $10, Blue Light protection is $25, and Progressive lenses are $40.99 — lower than market rates.

At launch, Cheeterz Club offers 14 different styles ranging from traditional to the more modern, starting at $28.99.

Farrelly says finding the right price was key, because unlike regular glasses, consumers often buy multiple pairs of readers to leave around the house or car, pack in purses and bags, and so on.

“If I break something that costs me a couple $100, I’d be really upset about it,” she says. “But at a drugstore price of under $30, I can have them in all sorts of colors and different tints.”

For Farrelly, making the startup a success goes beyond brining higher-quality reading glasses to market. It’s also about serving a demographic that often gets overlooked.

“Founders in their forties do not get representation, and it’s unfortunate. And there are also people in their forties and fifties that have disposable income and are looking for cute things. They’re spending so much money on facial creams and Botox,” she says, “but then you’re forced to put this really ugly pair of glasses on your face that make you feel bad about yourself.”

While Cheeterz Club today is selling direct to the consumer, the company is talking to eye doctors, boutiques and others who may eventually resell for them, as more of a B2B model. It’s also testing selling on Amazon with one pair of Blue Light glasses.

Cheeterz Club plans to start discussing fundraising with seed investors later this fall.

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UK-based Heroes raises $200M to buy up more Amazon merchants for its roll-up play

Heroes, one of the new wave of startups aiming to build big e-commerce businesses by buying up smaller third-party merchants on Amazon’s Marketplace, has raised another big round of funding to double down on that strategy. The London startup has picked up $200 million, money that it will mainly be using to snap up more merchants. Existing brands in its portfolio cover categories like baby, pets, sports, personal health and home and garden categories — some of them, like PremiumCare dog chews, the Onco baby car mirror, gardening tool brand Davaon and wooden foot massager roller Theraflow, category best-sellers — and the plan is to continue building up all of these verticals.

Crayhill Capital Management, a fund based out of New York, is providing the funding, and Riccardo Bruni — who co-founded the company with twin brother Alessio and third brother Giancarlo — said that the bulk of it will be going towards making acquisitions, and is therefore coming in the form of debt.

Raising debt rather than equity at this point is pretty standard for companies like Heroes. Heroes itself is pretty young: it launched less than a year ago, in November 2020, with $65 million in funding, a round comprised of both equity and debt. Other investors in the startup include 360 Capital, Fuel Ventures and Upper 90.

Heroes is playing in what is rapidly becoming a very crowded field. Not only are there are tens of thousands of businesses leveraging Amazon’s extensive fulfillment network to sell goods on the e-commerce giant’s Marketplace; but some days it seems we are also rapidly approaching a state of nearly as many startups launching to consolidate these third-party sellers.

Many a roll-up play follows a similar playbook, which goes like this: Amazon provides the Marketplace to sell goods to consumers, and the infrastructure to fulfill those orders, by way of Fulfillment By Amazon and its Prime service. Meanwhile, the roll-up business — in this case Heroes — buys up a number of the stronger companies leveraging FBA and the Marketplace. Then, by consolidating them into a single tech platform that they have built, Heroes creates better economies of scale around better and more efficient supply chains, sharper machine learning and marketing and data analytics technology, and new growth strategies. 

What is notable about Heroes, though — apart from the fact that it’s the first roll-up player to come out of the UK, and continues to be one of the bigger players in Europe — is that it doesn’t believe that the technology plays as important a role as having a solid relationship with the companies it’s targeting, key given that now the top Marketplace sellers are likely being feted by a number of companies as acquisition targets.

“The tech is very important,” said Alessio in an interview. “It helps us build robust processes that tie all the systems together across multiple brands and marketplaces. But what we have is very different from a SaaS business. We are not building an app, and tech is not the core of what we do. From the acquisitions side, we believe that human interactions ultimately win. We don’t think tech can replace a strong acquisition process.”

Image Credits: Heroes

Heroes’ three founder-brothers (two of them, Riccardo and Alessio, pictured above) have worked across a number of investment, finance and operational roles (the CVs include Merrill Lynch, EQT Ventures, Perella Weinberg Partners, Lazada, Nomura and Liberty Global) and they say there have been strong signs so far of its strategy working: of the brands that it has acquired since launching in November, they claim business (sales) has grown five-fold.

Collectively, the roll-up startups are raising hundreds of millions of dollars to fuel these efforts. Other recent hopefuls that have announced funding this year include Suma Brands ($150 million); Elevate Brands ($250 million); Perch ($775 million); factory14 ($200 million); Thrasio (currently probably the biggest of them all in terms of reach and money raised and ambitions), Heyday, The Razor Group, Branded, SellerX, Berlin Brands Group (X2), Benitago, Latin America’s Valoreo and Rainforest and Una Brands out of Asia. 

The picture that is emerging across many of these operations is that many of these companies, Heroes included, do not try to make their particular approaches particularly more distinctive than those of their competitors, simply because — with nearly 10 million third-party sellers today on Amazon globally — the opportunity is likely big enough for all of them, and more, not least because of current market dynamics.

“It’s no secret that we were inspired by Thrasio and others,” Riccardo said. “Combined with Covid-19, there has been a massive acceleration of e-commerce across the continent.” It was that, plus the realization that the three brothers had the right e-commerce, fundraising and investment skills between them, that made them see what was a “perfect storm” to tackle the opportunity, he continued. “So that is why we jumped into it.”

In the case of Heroes, while the majority of the funding will be used for acquisitions, it’s also planning to double headcount from its current 70 employees before the end of this year with a focus on operational experts to help run their acquired businesses. 

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Compounds Foods brews up $4.5M to make coffee without beans

Maricel Saenz, founder and CEO of Compound Foods, is among the over 80% of Americans who love a cup of coffee daily. And she also loves the environment.

However, when the Costa Rican-born entrepreneur, now living in the Bay Area, saw how climate change was affecting coffee growers around the world — coffee is the fifth-most polluting crop in the value chain — she wanted to create a coffee product that tasted good, but was also sustainable.

“Temperatures are rising and combined with erratic rains are leading to lower crop yield,” Saenz told TechCrunch. “The same crop can’t grow in the same place anymore, or it will be a lower quality product. Farmers in Costa Rica are having to sell their land or go higher up the mountain. Experts predict that 50% of farmland will be unsuitable in the next couple of decades.”

Founded in 2020, Compound Foods uses synthetic biology to create coffee without coffee beans by extracting molecules. Saenz said the company spent a lot of time examining what makes coffee, well coffee, and then trying to correlate flavors and aromas in certain ways.

And yes, the company can still call it “coffee” even if it doesn’t contain coffee beans because there is no official regulatory definition, she said.

They use food science to recreate a base formula using sustainable ingredients that also don’t use a lot of water — she said it takes 140 liters of water along the coffee growth chain to make one cup of coffee. The company is also working toward a goal of being able to recreate coffee inspired by flavors that you would get from different areas of the world, like Costa Rica, but also the chocolate notes from a cup of Brazilian coffee.

Compound Foods announced $4.5 million in seed funding to give it total funding of $5.3 million to date. Backers of the company include Chris Sacca’s climate fund Lowercarbon Capital, SVLC, Humboldt Fund, Collaborative Fund, Maple VC, Petri Bio and angel investors like Nick Green, CEO of Thrive Market.

Saenz intends to use the new funding to improve the formulation and scale up the brand as the company works toward a soft launch by the end of the year.

There are a few competitors in the space doing different technology, including Seattle-based Atomo, which said it makes its coffee from “other fruits and plants that had seeds similar to coffee beans.”

Compound Foods is hiring coffee lovers to help build out its technology and to expand its marketing, product and business teams.

Saenz is clear that the company is not competing with coffee.

“We love coffee and know the farmers, and we are providing an alternative solution,” she added. “We want to recreate it, and even drink it on Mars one day, and we want to bring the coffee farmers and the industry with us on the journey.”

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Quip’s new $100M round will usher in more than just clean teeth

Quip is on a mission to be the go-to platform for both personal and professional oral care, and a new $100 million cash infusion is giving the New York-based company fuel to do it.

The new round from Cowen Sustainable Investments (CSI), labeled a Series B, follows the company reaching profitability in April 2020 and gives Quip more than $160 million in total funding since the company was founded in 2015. Its last publicly announced raise was $40 million in 2018. The company showcased its service at TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley in 2015.

At that time, Quip was best known as a subscription-based toothbrush replacement service, but over the years has steadily taken on more of the $435 billion global oral healthcare market by adding other products like flossers, mouthwash, gum, smart electric toothbrushes and, most recently, a virtual orthodontist-enabled clear aligner service launched in April.

Quip raises another $40 million for dental care products and services

Company co-founder and CEO Simon Enever told TechCrunch that its long-term vision is to “build a lasting global business in the oral care category, and it is important to keep the business on the right scale.” Quip is focused on growth, innovation and community building among its over 7.5 million customers in 100 countries.

“The timing of this round, and raising such a significant round, was deliberate and strategic,” he added. “We wanted to prove a couple of things: that we create a high-profile, profitable core business that people know today, aligning the first pieces of the pie on our oral care app and then services, such as the clear aligner that we launched a couple of months ago.”

When Quip first launched and received funding six years ago, there were very few oral care startups and not much funding going into the space, Enever said. In fact, that was what led him to start the company in the first place — a dental visit eight years ago where he learned how little investment was being made to improve the space. Since then, more startups are innovating dental care and there is investment in both the personal care side and professional, especially in sub areas like orthodontics and appointment bookings, which Quip is working on, he added.

The new funding will enable the company to further scale its personal care platform, which already has over 7.5 million users, and continue to connect them with a network of more than 50,000 dental professionals. It will also go into new verticals, expand its global footprint and roll out new features to its oral care companion mobile app.

Quip expects to reach over 1 million app users in 2022, Enever said. New features will complement the company’s mission to track oral habits, coaching and health monitoring. Members can then earn points by improving their habits and health and redeem them for products and discounts from Quip and other partners.

Enever also plans to double Quip’s 200-person team (located in New York and Salt Lake City) by the end of 2022.

“We had an amazing lean and driven team that has gotten us to the point where we are at now, and we are excited to scale that and have more support to take things to the next level,” he added. “It is incredible to watch the team. In the past few years, they hit their goals and launched four brand new personal care product lines, rolled out in Walmart and helped us become profitable. It has been amazing to watch the team despite the pandemic.”

Retail sales are up more than 100% compared to last year, according to the company. In addition to going into Walmart, the company’s products are also in Target, giving it over 10,000 retail locations.

As part of the investment, Artem Mariychin, managing director at CSI, is joining the company’s board. CSI, an environmental sustainability focused growth investment strategy, looks for companies having a positive impact on the world’s environment, like addressing waste, which was one of the attractions to Quip, he said.

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The company estimated over 100 million single-use plastic components were diverted from landfills through its paper packaging and refillable products recycling program. It aims to reach over 1 million pounds of plastic reduction or diversion in the next 12 months.

Mariychin was also attracted to Quip’s growth versus other consumer companies and its ability to be capital efficient and also consumer-centric, something he said was unique in the oral care business.

“They aren’t expensive, but they are high-quality and solve consumer needs and pain points,” he said. “Simon’s origin was to improve brushing outcomes — only 50% of people brush twice a day now. However, with the brush built, they looked at what else they can do and expanded into the floss pick and mouthwash. What is impressive is that subscribers are now purchasing other products. Quip is now expanding into other parts of dental, like the liners, and that is atypical of others in e-commerce.”

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Owner.com serves up $10.7M so that independent restaurants can get cooking

Independent restaurants don’t typically have the luxury to create their own online food ordering and delivery capabilities or negotiate for lower rates from legacy ordering platforms like the large restaurant chains do.

Here’s where Owner.com comes in. The Beverly Hills-based company provides a free online ordering, delivery and marketing platform for independent restaurants that puts them on similar playing fields with the big guys. And unlike the legacy food delivery services, Owner.com restaurants own their customer data and can automate marketing campaigns.

Adam Guild is the company’s 21-year-old co-founder and CEO, a high school dropout and a Thiel Fellow, who originally started by assisting his mother’s dog grooming business that was having difficulties attracting customers. After stepping in with some online marketing methods, her business grew, and later expanded into multiple locations. Guild then wanted to work with a bigger group of people and stumbled across restaurants while helping some clients create online landing pages.

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With consumer demand shifting to primarily online ordering and delivery over the past 18 months, online ordering revenue is expected to double from $248 billion in 2020 to $449 billion by 2025. Ordering platforms like Doordash, Uber Eats and Grubhub control 80% of orders and typically charge between 20% and 30% per order to restaurants and additional fees to consumers.

In contrast, Owner.com is free for restaurants and charges customers a flat $4 fee when they order from the website. Guild explained that larger restaurant chains have the buying power to negotiate lower rates, while independent restaurants do not. With the inability to keep up, some 110,000 restaurants in the U.S. closed in 2020.

Guild initially bootstrapped his company, working with large restaurant chains, like P.F. Chang’s, drive online orders. Then the global pandemic hit. He ended up losing all of his revenue and had to let all of his employees go but one. To add to his bad luck, he was then rejected from Y Combinator and other accelerator programs.

“For the first three days, I was depressed,” Guild told TechCrunch. “I had spent two years building a company and now it was dead. In the same way we were disrupted, I began to think there was no better position to be in than a scrappy startup. I didn’t know what the next business would look like, so I started cold-calling restaurant owners, asking how I can be helpful and what type of technology they were looking for. Many of them told me that online ordering sucked, but if they didn’t solve it soon, they would go out of business.”

One pivot and a year later with co-founder Dean Bloembergen, Owner.com closed on $10.7 million in seed funding led by SaaStr Fund, with participation from Redpoint Ventures and Day One Ventures, as well as a group of individual investors including Naval Ravikant, CNBC’s The Profit host Marcus Lemonis, The Kitchen Restaurant Group’s Kimbal Musk, DoNotPay founder Joshua Browder, Figma founder Dylan Field, The Chainsmokers and independent restaurant owners and customers of Owner.com.

Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr Fund, said restaurant SaaS was a space in which his firm was interested in investing, but thought it was a bit boring — there were already quite a few vendors in the space, like Toast and Grubhub, and most were just technology solutions. However, when he heard that Owner.com was a break-out company from the monotony, he said he had to take a look.

“The ability to own the customer relationship is that ultimate differentiation,” Lemkin said. “Their ultimate goal is to provide a robust technology platform to increase margins, have people order more and come back often.”

Meanwhile, Guild intends to use the new funding to continue product development and add new features like landing pages, the ability to make reservations and native apps for white-label service.

Since the launch last year, the company has reached a seven-figure run-rate and over 105% monthly revenue retention across over 700 restaurant locations, Guild said. To date, Owner.com has transacted over $18 million and helped its restaurant customers avoid paying $3 million to online order platform fees annually.

“It’s all about empowering the 40% of the restaurant industry that is run by people who started off in entry-level positions, and over the years, worked their way up to own the ‘American Dream,’ ” he added.

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Shopware Community Day 2021

Shopware Community Day 2021 takes place on the 2nd of September 2021, when the Shopware Community Day will take place for the eleventh time.

There is an exceptional speaker line-up for Shopware Community Day 2021, including presentations from Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak and Gary Vaynerchuk, one of the leading global experts on culture, relevance and the internet, plus an additional 90 speakers on three virtual stages. The participation for the digital event is free of charge.

What started out as a small company exhibition in 2011 has developed into a unique ecommerce event in a little more than a decade.

“The Shopware Community Day is for everybody that loves ecommerce, never stands still, and constantly pushes boundaries. Together with our community, we want to imagine the future of retail, exchange experiences, and collect new ideas.”
– Sebastian Hamann, CEO, Shopware

Due to COVID-19, the SCD 2021 will once again take place in a purely digital form – but will still boast an incredible speaker line-up: Besides Steve Wozniak and Gary Vaynerchuk, the likes of Peer Stemmler, Head of DACH at Zoom, IT-expert Aya Jaff, and many more will provide exciting insights into different aspects of digital life.

Experiencing Shopware – At the SCD and DMEXCO

“We look forward to celebrating this day together with our community. Especially in times like these, it is of great importance to us to be approachable, tangible, and to shine a light on human interaction. That’s what the SCD stands for.”
– Sebastian Hamann, CEO, Shopware

Fittingly, the content from the three stages at the Shopware Community Day will be almost completely live and attendees can engage in virtual interaction and networking with the experts, Shopware employees, and partners.

In addition to Shopware Community Day 2021, Shopware will be exhibiting on this year’s DMEXCO @home on the 7th and 8th of September 7th. Here, Shopware will have its own brand room – a digital space where attendees can dive into the world of Shopware. Furthermore, Shopware will discuss cloud technology in their presentation on the first event day at 10:00 am GMT on stage MC4.

The Shopware Community Day 2021 will take place on the 2nd of September as a purely digital event. Participation is free of charge, attendees are only asked to register prior to the event at scd.shopware.com.

The post Shopware Community Day 2021 appeared first on Tamebay.

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Prive has raised $1.7 million to build a more configurable e-commerce subscription platform

Prive, a months-old, San Francisco-based startup founded by two former Uber product managers, just raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding to create what it describes as a far more customizable e-commerce subscriptions platform for D2C brands.

The round was co-led by Patrick Chung and Brandon Farwell at XFund and Ben Ling from Bling Capital, with participation from Defy Partners, Halogen Ventures, and Uber executives.

Founded by Claudia Laurie and Alex Craciun — who both spent two-and-a-half years at Uber and decided, based on their learnings about pricing and incentives, to leave the company earlier this year —  Prive aims to better enable small retailers to compete with behemoths like Amazon.

The broad idea is that by plugging into existing APIs from Shopify and other e-commerce platforms, Prive can form an opinion that it sells to merchants about what customers tend to buy on a recurrent basis. Maybe it sees that people who buy razors also tend to buy toothbrushes on a similar cadence, for example. It passes that information along, then helps the brand create more customized, and flexible, offerings so that their shoppers are presented with items they might, as well as can more easily cancel items

“The market opportunity is huge, and the existing [e-commerce subscription] tools are just scratching the surface,” notes Laurie. Indeed, according to the group eMarketer,  subscription e-commerce sales have grown 41% from the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and it foresees that 3% of US retail e-commerce sales will come from subscriptions this year, totaling $27.67 billion. That’s up from $10 billion in just two years’ time.

Of course, a lot has yet to be built, which is where the pre-seed funding comes in. Right now, Prive is a seven-person team with some serious competition, namely from Recharge, a seven-year-old, Santa Monica, Calif.-based subscription e-commerce company that in May raised $277 million in growth capital at a post-money valuation of $2.1 billion. As of that announcement, Recharge had roughly 330 employees and was fueling the subscription service for what it said was 15,000 merchants and 20 million subscribers worldwide.

Other rivals include nine-year-old, Bold Commerce (it has raised $44 million altogether), and 10-year-old, Chargebee, which has raised around $220 million over the years, according to Crunchbase data.

“E-commerce ‘subscription’ is an incredibly hot buzzword,” acknowledges Craciun, but he also thinks the today’s current product offerings are just scratching the service.

Clearly, investors are willing to gamble that he’s right — and that Prive could be the team to prove it.

“Current tools can create more headaches than they actually solve,” says Craciun. “There is a lot of rigidity in today’s subscriptions that makes it very difficult to identify the right recurring mix of offerings. We’re here to break down that mental model.”

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Brazil’s Petlove raises $150M from Riverwood, SoftBank to sell pet products and services online

Petlove&Co, a São Paulo-based digital platform for products and services for the pet market, announced today that it has raised about $150 million (R$750 million) today in a funding round led by Riverwood Capital.

The round is nearly double that of what Petlove has raised in its history. The company started its life as PetSuperMarket when it was founded in 1999 in the early days of the internet. Today, the company continues to operate an online store offering a wide range of pet products and services.

Tarpon, SoftBank, L Catterton, Porto Seguro and Monashees also participated in the funding round, which brings the company’s total raised to a known $225.8 million over its lifetime, according to Crunchbase. Since January 2020 alone, Petlove has raised over $192 million. The company has declined to reveal at what valuation this last round was raised.

Petlove CEO Talita Lacerda said the company will use the new capital in part to further expand its logistics network with the goal of accelerating its delivery capabilities. In particular, it plans to expand its express delivery service, Petlove Já, which allows products to be delivered within 4 hours of placing their order, to other geographies. Currently it is only available in a few cities in Brazil, such as São Paulo and Belo Horizonte. 

The funding will also go toward growing Petlove’s subscription program, which Lacerda said is the first of its kind in the country, and one of the company’s flagship services.

“The Brazilian pet market is one of the largest in the world and Brazilian consumers are increasingly demanding digitally native products and services with a high level of customer-centricity,” said Francisco Alvarez-Demalde, co-founding partner and managing partner at Riverwood Capital, in a written statement.

The company has evolved and grown after a recent integration with DogHero, the acquisitions of Vetus and VetSmart and the launch of Porto.Pet.

“We have built an increasingly comprehensive and inclusive platform to meet the needs of all stakeholders in this rapidly expanding market,” Lacerda said.

Brazil is the 4th largest pet market in total spend, the company says. According to the Instituto Pet Brasil, total sales of the Brazilian pet market surpassed US$7 billion (R$40 billion) in 2020, growing 13.5% compared to the previous year, while Petlove grew 65%. Overall, pet ownership in the country is high, with 60% of Brazilians owning pets compared to 50% in the US. 

Petlove has over 400 employees, according to Pitchbook.

Alex Szapiro, head of Brazil and operating partner of SoftBank Latin America Fund described the work that Petlove has done to help “form the largest ecosystem in Latin America” as  “one of the most extraordinary in the segment and in the entire retail sector.”

Mixlab raises $20M to provide purrfect pharmacy experience for pet parents

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Russell Westbrook, Chainsmokers join group pouring $13.5M into prebiotic soda brand Poppi

Poppi, a prebiotic soda brand, closed $13.5 million in a Series A2 round and is on a mission to lead in the new category of “functional soda” by offering a better-for-you product that also tastes good.

The investor group includes CAVU Ventures as well as sports and entertainment celebrities like Russell Westbrook, the Chainsmokers, 24kGoldn, Kygo, Halsey, Kevin Love, Ellie Goulding, Olivia Munn, Nicole Scherzinger, Chantel Jeffries, Bryce Hall, Noah Beck, Josh Richards, Griffin Johnson and Blake Gray.

Husband-and-wife co-founders Stephen and Allison Ellsworth, former oil and gas researchers, launched the soda in 2020 after Allison Ellsworth began having stomach issues about two years prior. She went to doctor after doctor without a definitive diagnosis and decided to take to the internet to find some answers. She not only found that 80% of our body’s immunity stems from gut health, but that she could assist by healing her body through food.

One of the foods that helped with the stomach issues was apple cider vinegar, but drinking it straight everyday became difficult for her. So she went into the kitchen and began concocting a drink that would help her tolerate the vinegar and be tasty enough to drink regularly.

What resulted was a drink that eventually became a hit at a Dallas farmers market, which is where the pair was approached to sell Poppi in Whole Foods Market. They then decided to quit their jobs and do Poppi full time, even gaining a deal from CAVU Ventures co-founder Rohan Oza on Shark Tank in December 2018.

Each can of Poppi includes approximately a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, sparkling water, real fruit and plant-based sweeteners mixed into a formula that provides a balance of gut-friendly prebiotics known to aid in digestion, immunity and glowing skin.

The drinks retail for $2.49 per can and come in nine flavors like watermelon, strawberry lemon, raspberry rose and orange. They are available in over 7,500 retail locations, including Target, Safeway, Kroger, Publix, Whole Foods and Amazon.com.

Allison and Stephen Ellsworth, Poppi co-founders. Image Credits: Poppi

Now the Ellsworths say they are receiving comments from consumers who say Poppi has “changed their lives.”

“At the end of the day, we are putting out a product that is healthy and tastes good,” Allison Ellsworth said. “We don’t want to be a niche health product — that is secondary to what we are trying to do, but it’s a bonus that we get that, too.”

Another bonus is that within the functional soda category, which has grown 465% year over year based on data from research company SPINS, the Ellsworths boast their annual growth put Poppi in the No. 1 spot based on four-week data from SPINS ending June 13, 2021.

Prior to the round, the company was bootstrapped. Proceeds will be used to expand distribution, scale Poppi’s team of 50 currently and marketing. The company is based in Dallas for now, but Allison Ellsworth said the company is moving its headquarters to Austin.

The company grew its revenue 550% year over year and the funding assists in giving Poppi a burn rate of 12 months and the ability to continue in high-growth mode, Stephen Ellsworth said.

Stevie Clements, chief brand architect at CAVU Ventures and a member of Poppi’s board, said via email that the company’s product, founders and growth to date were the drivers for her firm to invest in the company.

In addition, people are looking for products like Poppi that do more for them, while gut health, in particular, is a highly relevant category. The company’s ability to “deliver real function with incredible flavor is unlike anything on the market,” she said.

“Soda is a massive category ripe for disruption, and Stephen and Allison are a great team with an authentic story that’s really proven to resonate with people,” Clements added. “We’re excited by what Poppi has accomplished thus far and feel strongly that a better-for-you soda that tastes amazing and offers real function can shake up the multibillion dollar soda category.”

IoT and data science will boost foodtech in the post-pandemic era

 

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Flip bags $28M to turn beauty, wellness social commerce on its head

Social commerce startup Flip is mixing live commerce mobile apps with real customer reviews to improve the buying experience and opportunity for the creator economy. Today, the Los Angeles-based company closed on a $28 million Series A led Streamlined Ventures.

Nooruldeen “Noor” Agha, a serial e-commerce entrepreneur, founded Flip in 2019 after emigrating to the United States from Iraq. He had previously lived in Dubai, where he built some companies in the e-commerce space.

It was while leading the companies that he realized that the vision of commerce was broken and that people had a fragmented path to purchase: They may start on social media, then move to video platforms and conclude on yet another site to make the purchase.

Agha believes the future of e-commerce will be driven by shoppers and the experiences they have with social media, so Flip is pulling all of those experiences into one app, mixing in user-generated reviews and live shopping shows for beauty, wellness and health brands. It then adds same-day shipping and back-end logistics, Agha told TechCrunch. Users post video reviews of their purchases and can see in real-time data how they did, as well as receive commissions from sales that resulted from their posts.

“It’s not only a social platform, it is the best post-purchase experience — shipping, rewards, returns — everything people love and in a two-click process,” he added. “Our app is like if TikTok and Amazon had a baby.”

Joining Streamlined Ventures in the latest round is Mubadala Capital Ventures, BDMI and a group of early backers and angel investors, including Ruby Lu, an early investor in Kuaishou, China’s leading social commerce platform. In total, Flip raised $31.5 million, which includes a small seed two years ago, Agha said.

He intends to use the new funding to scale the company and its creator ecosystem, while also expanding the end-to-end logistics part of the platform.

Live commerce originated in China, where McKinsey estimates the market reached $171 billion in 2020 and will jump to a valuation of $423 billion by 2022. Meanwhile, U.S. live commerce market is trailing behind, expecting to reach $11 billion by the end of 2021.

Flip is now signing an average of 20 new brands per week and has already gained partnerships with Unilever and Coty. Agha expects to hit 500 brands by this year’s holiday season. In addition, the company has 1 million downloads and in the last quarter shopped out 30,000 orders, which Agha predicts will double in coming months.

“We were hiding on purpose so we could build out everything and be done when we launched,” he added. “We focused on onboarding brands instead of pushing for growth, but now we expect to have a grand launch at the end of September where we start aggressively pushing growth.”

Ullas Naik, founder and general partner of Streamlined Ventures, said his firm does a lot of investment in e-commerce and marketplaces and was one of the first investors in DoorDash and also backed Rappi.

Commerce has evolved over the past 20 years in a meaningful way, he said. During that time, spend shifted from retail and online, while the quality of the experience has also evolved. He has seen evidence of similar models in other geographies, particularly in China when they have “had massive success.”

“We are most intrigued with how live commerce intersects with social networking to create enhanced shopping experiences,” Naik said. “When I met with Noor and he told me he was going to start with beauty and cosmetics, I thought he was building a unique experience and wanted him to be in a broad range of categories, not just beauty. With what he is building on the back end, with the logistics piece, he is creating a super experience and I’m intrigued by what can be built.”

Livestream e-commerce: Why companies and brands need to tune in

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Thatch using $3M round to put travel creators on the map

After a difficult year, the travel industry is gaining steam again this summer and Thatch is carving out a space for itself in the sector by enabling travel creators to monetize their recommendations.

Today the company announced a $3 million Seed II round led by Wave Capital. They were joined by Freestyle VC’s Jenny Lefcourt, Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph and Airbnb’s head of data science for user trust, Kapil Gupta. It brings Thatch’s total investment to $5.2 million since the company was founded by West Askew, Abby West and Shane Farmer in 2018.

Prior to the global pandemic, the company was a subscription-based consumer travel service that matched travelers with someone who would essentially plan their trips from top to bottom. Then the industry came to a grinding halt in 2020, and the co-founders saw a bigger need to help travel creators — those who share their experiences on social media — better connect to their followers and capture value for the travel recommendations, tips and perspectives they create.

“We noticed consumers were willing to pay individuals for their time and expertise,” Abby West told TechCrunch. “Increasingly, instead of going to travel agencies, they are going to Instagram or YouTube and then DM’ing them for information. We are formalizing that relationship so that the travel creator can get paid and can then provide a better experience for the end user.”

Askew and West say travel creators drive billions of dollars of consumer travel spending. Thatch’s free mobile app provides tools for them to build their own travel-based businesses in order to curate, share and will soon be able to sell interactive travel guides and planning services. Thatch makes money when the creators do, taking a small percentage of the transactions.

While the pandemic was detrimental to the travel industry, it gave the Thatch team time to build out its app, and now it is focused on building the creator side and marketing to attract creators to the app. This is where the new funding will come in: The company intends to hire additional engineers, build out new content and launch new features for selling or earning tips on interactive guides that creators produce in the app.

Thatch app. Image Credits: Thatch

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Among the travel creators already using the app, their audience reach is over 12 million, and the company saw a bump in usage in July, a sign that the travel industry is improving, Askew said.

Following the seed, the company will go live with the monetization and booking features so the creators can get paid, and it is looking at a strong first quarter in terms of potential bookings. The founders also want to attract larger creators and build a network for them, with Askew saying they need to be considered like the small businesses that they are and wants to help them grow.

“There is unfortunately a graveyard full of travel companies, but we are doing things differently,” West said. “We are unique with our people-to-people angle, and in this case, with people who have a built-in audience and who are trusted by that audience. That is something we don’t see in this space today.”

Wave Capital’s general partner Riley Newman said he and his other general partner, Sara Adler, both former Airbnb executives, were introduced to the company through one of Thatch’s existing investors.

His firm typically invests in marketplaces at the seed stage and the investment in Thatch marks the first into the travel sector, saying, “It is one we know well from Airbnb and a good moment to dive back into the industry.”

The travel market is poised for growth in the years ahead, especially with the pent-up demand for travel post-pandemic, Newman said. At the same time, the creator economy is on the same trajectory to democratize travel planning similar to the way he said Airbnb did, and that was a compelling vision for Wave Capital.

“Travel planning has been around for a long time, but this is an interesting new angle,” Newman added. “We look at the founding team and see Abby and West having complementary backgrounds and energy. This is a good moment for travel given their approach, and their concept for attacking the market is right and needed.”

COVID-19 pivot: Travel unicorn Klook sees jump in staycations

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Stonehenge Technology Labs bags $2M, gives CPG companies one-touch access to metrics

Stonehenge Technology Labs wants consumer packaged goods companies to gain meaningful use from all of the data they collect. It announced $2 million in seed funding for its STOPWATCH commerce enhancement software.

The round was led by Irish Angels, with participation from Bread and Butter Ventures, Gaingels, Angeles Investors, Bonfire Ventures and Red Tail Venture Capital.

CEO Meagan Kinmonth Bowman founded the Arkansas-based company in 2019 after working at Hallmark, where she was tasked with the digital transformation of the company.

“This was not a consequence of them not being good marketers or connected to mom, but they didn’t have the technology to connect their back end with retailers like Amazon, Walmart or Hobby Lobby,” she told TechCrunch. “There are so many smart people building products to connect with consumers. The challenge is the big guys are doing things the same way and not thinking like the 13-year-olds on social media that are actually winning the space.”

End-to-end operators are the next generation of consumer business

Kinmonth Bowman and her team recognized that there was a missing middle layer connecting the world of dotcom with brick and mortar. If the middle layer could be applied to the enterprise resource plans and integrate public and private data feeds, a company could be just as profitable online as it could be in traditional retail, she said.

Stonehenge’s answer to that is STOPWATCH, which takes in over 100 million rows of data per workspace per day, analyzes the data points, adds real-time alerts and provides the right data to the right people at the right time.

Dan Rossignol, a B2B SaaS investor, said the CPG world is also about consumerizing our life, and the global pandemic showed that even at home, people could have a productive day and business. Rossignol likes to invest in underestimated founders and saw in Stonehenge a company that is getting CPGs out from underneath antiquated technologies.

“What Meagan and her team are doing is really interesting,” he added. “At this stage, it is all about the people, and the ability to bet on doing something larger.”

Kinmonth Bowman said she had the opportunity to base the company in Silicon Valley, but chose Bentonville, Arkansas instead to be closer to the more than 1,000 CPG companies based there that she felt were the prime customer base for STOPWATCH.

The platform was originally created as a subsidiary of a consulting company, but in 2018, one of their clients told them they just wanted the software rather than also paying for the consulting piece. The business was split, and Stonehenge went underground for eight months to make a software product specifically for the client.

Kinmonth Bowman admits the technology itself is not that sexy — it is using exact transfer loads to extract data from hundreds of systems into a “lake house,” and then siloing it by retailer and other factors and then presenting the data in different ways. For example, the CEO will want different metrics than product teams.

Over the past year, the company has doubled its revenue and also doubled the amount of contracts. It already counts multiple Fortune 100 companies and emerging brands as some of its early users and plans to use the new funding to hire a sales team and go after some strategic relationships.

Checkout is the key to frictionless B2B e-commerce

Stonehenge is also working on putting together a diverse workforce that mimics the users of the software, Kinmonth Bowman said. One of the challenges has been to get unique talent to move to Arkansas, but she said it is one she is eager to take on.

Meanwhile, Brett Brohl, managing partner at Bread and Butter Ventures, said the Stonehenge team “is just crazy enough, smart and driven” to build something great.

“All of the biggest companies have been around for a long time, but not a lot of large organizations have done a good job digitizing their businesses,” he said. “Even pre-COVID, they were building fill-in-the-blank digital transformations, but COVID accelerated technology and hit a lot of companies in the face. That was made more obvious to end consumers, which puts more pressure on companies to understand the need, which is good for STOPWATCH. It went from paper to Excel spreadsheets to the next cloud modification. The time is right for the next leap and how to use data.”

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Accounting platform Synder raises $2M to automate e-commerce bookkeeping

As Synder’s two co-founders Michael Astreiko and Ilya Kisel wrap up their time at Y Combinator, they also announced their seed round of $2 million from TMT Investments.

Though the round was acquired before going into the accelerator program, the Belarus-based pair wanted to wait to publicly share the milestone. As they focus their sights on their next journey of growth and expansion, the new funding will go toward attracting more clients, visibility and sales.

The company bills itself as an easy accounting platform for e-commerce businesses. It was originally founded as CloudBusiness in 2016 and developed accounting automation and management of business finances for small and mid-size businesses.

Astreiko and Kisel started Synder, in 2018 and a year later focused on the company full-time to develop an easy way for commerce companies to shift to omnichannel sales, something Astreiko told TechCrunch can be “a huge pain” due to the complexity of different payment systems and high fees.

“There are a lot of solutions on the market, but you still have to have special knowledge to operate within accounting or commerce,” Kisel said. “For us, the simplicity means that it is worth it if you can have access in several clicks to consolidated inventory, profits and liabilities. Small businesses sometimes are not sharing this information due to competition, but if something is working and easy, they will definitely share it.”

Synder does the heavy lifting for companies by connecting sales channels like Amazon, Shopify, eBay and Etsy into one platform that users can manage with one-click operations. It also created a way to help the accounting stream so that all of the different payment methods can still be used, Kisel said.

The company is already working with 4,000 clients, and will now be fast-tracking their expansion, but will need the right people on board to help the company grow, Astreiko said.

Igor Shoifot, a partner at TMT Investments, said he will join Synder’s board after the company graduates from YC. He likes the simplicity of what the company is doing.

Embedded procurement will make every company its own marketplace

“Often the best solutions are economical, succinct and elegant — you can be onboarded in 10 minutes,” he added. “There is really nobody that really provides a similar solution that was that easy or didn’t require downloading or installing something. I also like their focus on growth, the fact they have no burn and they are making money.”

Synder’s business model is a subscription SaaS model that starts off as a free trial, and users can purchase additional services inside the platform to fit small and large companies.

Its more than 15 employees are spread around Europe, and the company just started hiring in the areas of marketing and sales in the U.S.

 

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Diamond Logistics CEO joins The Prince’s Trust Enterprise Network

Entrepreneur Kate Lester, CEO and founder of nationwide network Diamond Logistics, has joined The Prince’s Trust Enterprise Network for the South East as a founding member.

The Prince’s Trust is one of the UK’s largest youth support charities. Each year it helps tens of thousands of young people from some of the toughest backgrounds to rediscover hope, build confidence and realise their potential.

The Prince’s Trust programmes, which have been adapted to the needs of young people and society over the years, help young people to get back on track at school, find sustainable work, or start a business. To date, it has supported over a million young people.
Kate, who has won a number of business awards, benefited from The Prince’s Trust’s advice and resources when she started her own company 30 years ago and is eager to return the support.

The work has already begun. In June Kate delivered an inspirational talk and Q&A to a group of aspiring start-ups in the North East. She has also taken part in the Millionaire Makers event in July, an entrepreneurial challenge which raises critical funds for The Prince’s Trust.

“It’s incredibly important, as difficult as it may feel out there at the minute, to keep inspiring the businesses of the future. Many moons ago I used The Prince’s Trust website to write my first business plans, and now 30+ years later, it is great to be able to make a long-term commitment to support them in the future.”
– Kate Lester, CEO and founder, Diamond Logistics

From providing guidance and advice, to supporting events and opening up new networks and introductions, Kate will play an essential role in helping The Prince’s Trust to transform tens of thousands of lives every year.

The Prince’s Trust Enterprise Network is an engaged community of entrepreneurs who are passionate about making entrepreneurial ambition a reality for young people. If this is something you’d like to be involved in, you find out more and how to get involved on The Prince’s Trust website.

The post Diamond Logistics CEO joins The Prince’s Trust Enterprise Network appeared first on Tamebay.

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Porsche expands online marketplace to include US inventory of new cars

Porsche Cars North America has added its entire U.S. inventory of new cars to its online marketplace as the company seeks to keep up with customer demands and the industry’s shift to digital commerce.

When the online marketplace Porsche Finder launched in May 2020, customers were only able to search for pre-owned and certified pre-owned vehicles using the tool. That platform, which lets customers search by vehicle model and generation as well as price, equipment, packages and colors, now includes all new vehicle inventory from its 193 U.S. dealerships.

The platform, which was developed by automaker’s Porsche Digital subsidiary and PCNA, also includes features that let customers estimate a trade-in value and a payment calculator to compare leasing and financing options from Porsche Financial Services.

Online platforms that allow customers to search for products are not new. As customers shift their shopping to online — a trend that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic — digital platforms have become a critical tool for companies.

Established automakers like Porsche, however, have had to balance the demand of its customers and dealership network. Porsche doesn’t have a direct sales model like Tesla and new entrants Lucid Group and Rivian.

“The dealership is still at the center of everything we do,” PCNA President and CEO Kjell Gruner said in a recent interview. “At the dealership, we believe very much in personal interaction — in looking somebody in the eye, reading their body language. And, of course, our products are very physical.”

While all 193 dealers are participating in the Porsche Finder tool, Gruner acknowledged that this large group includes those who have been more cautious about the move toward digital commerce.

“You always have some more innovative people, some more cautious,” he said. “COVID … really prompted a willingness to go digital and to use those tools for their own advantage.”

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Tuna raises $3M to address complexity of e-commerce payments in Latin America

Tuna, which means “fine tune” in Portuguese, is on a mission to “fine tune” the payments space in Latin America and has raised two seed rounds totaling $3 million, led by Canary and by Atlantico.

Alex Tabor, Paul Ascher and Juan Pascual met each other on the engineering team of Peixe Urbano, a company Tabor co-founded and he referred to as a “Groupon for Brazil.” While there, they came up with a way to use A/B testing to create a way of dealing with payments in different markets.

They eventually left Peixe Urbano and started Tuna in 2019 to make their own payment product which enables merchants to use A/B testing of credit card processors and anti-fraud providers to optimize their payments processing with one integration and a no-code interface.

Tabor explained that the e-commerce landscape in Latin America was consolidated, meaning few banks controlled more of the market. The address verification system merchants use to verify a purchaser is who they say they are, involves sending information to a bank that is returned to the merchant with a score of whether that match is legitimate.

“In the U.S., that score is used to determine if the purchaser is legit, but they didn’t implement that in Latin America,” he added. “Instead, merchants in Latam have to tap into other organizations that have that data.”

That process involves manual analysis and constant adjusting due to fraud. Instead, Tuna’s A/B tests between processors and anti-fraud providers in real time and provides a guarantee that a decision to swap providers is based on objective data that considers all components of performance, like approval rates, and not just fees.

Over the past year, the company added 12 customers and saw its revenue increase 15%. It boasts a customer list that includes the large Brazilian fashion chain Riachuelo, and its platform integrates with others including VTEX, Magento and WooCommerce.

The share of e-commerce in overall retail is less than 10 percent in Latin America. Marcos Toledo, Canary’s managing partner, said via email that e-commerce in Latam is currently at an inflexion point: not only has the global pandemic driven more online purchases, but also fintech innovation that has occurred in recent years.

In Brazil alone, e-commerce sales grew 73.88% in 2020, but Toledo said there was much room for improvement. What Tuna is building will help companies navigate the situation and make it easier for more customers to buy online.

Toledo met the Tuna team from his partner, Julio Vasconcellos, who was one of the co-founders of Peixe Urbano. When the firm heard that the other Tuna co-founders were starting a business that was applying some of the optimization methods they had created at Peixe Urbano, but for every company, they saw it as an opportunity to get involved.

“The vast tech expertise that Alex, Paul and Juan bring to a very technical business is something that we really admire, as well as their vision to create a solution that can impact companies throughout Latin America,” Toledo said. “The no-code solution that Tuna is building is exciting because it is scalable and can help companies not only get better margins, but also drive their developers to other efforts — and developers have been a very scarce workforce in the region.”

To meet demand for an e-commerce industry that surpassed $200 billion in 2020, Tuna plans to use the new funding to build out its team and grow outbound customer success and R&D, Tabor said.

Up next, he wants to be able to show traction in payments optimization and facilitators in Brazil before moving on to other countries. He has identified Mexico, Colombia and Argentina as potential new markets.

Current and upcoming trends in Latin America’s mobile growth

 

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