The co-CEOs of SellerX, an Amazon aggregator startup backed by BlackRock, are set to depart the company, three years after selling shares worth at least $7.1m each.
Philipp Triebel and Malte Horeyseck founded SellerX, which is based in Berlin, in August 2020 and have been co-CEOs since then. An email sent to staff earlier today, seen by Sifted, announcing their departure said that Jeremy Bell, the cofounder of Elevate, an aggregator acquired by SellerX in May last year, will take over as CEO starting on July 1.
SellerX confirmed the departure to Sifted. In the email to staff, Horeyseck described the move as “bittersweet,” adding that the “hardest and most important decision that any founder can make is recognising when it’s time to step aside”.
The company is one of the most prominent European aggregators, which buy up smaller Amazon sellers and grow them. Such companies boomed in the pandemic when lockdowns fuelled an online shopping frenzy. VCs rushed to back the startups — in October 2021, three of Europe’s aggregators raised a combined $1bn in a single day.
SellerX secured the backing of investors including Cherry Ventures, Felix Capital, Partech, BlackRock, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and L Catterton. It raised a €100m Series B in August 2021, and a further $500m in a combination of debt and equity just a few months later in November that year.
But, following in the footsteps of other pandemic-era businesses like speedy grocery and revenue-based financing, the Amazon aggregator industry struggled in 2022 and companies, including SellerX, were forced to lay off staff.
Cashing out
Public shareholder documents in Germany show that Horeyseck and Triebel sold shares as part of the company’s $500m funding round in November 2021.
At the time, SellerX said it held a pre-money valuation of $1bn. At that valuation, the shares sold by the two cofounders would have been worth at least $7.1m each.
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SellerX told Sifted that it does not comment on company financials.
Layoffs
A few months after the founders sold their shares, in early 2022, the company made the first of several rounds of layoffs. There were further layoffs in the summer of 2022 and again in the summer of 2023.
Other aggregators also made layoffs, including Heroes, a British company which had raised $300m and Berlin Brands Group, the oldest of the European players in the space, which had raised $940m.
During the pandemic, a cohort of aggregators emerged at the same time, sparking bidding wars for the best Amazon sellers and forcing up the prices of companies to the point where buyers struggled to make returns off them.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/sellerx-ceos-depart-share-sale-news/
