Vinted, the secondhand marketplace startup, has unveiled a new in-house VC arm, which will invest in other “re-commerce” businesses around the world.
Founded in 2008, Vilnius-based Vinted has steadily established itself as one of Europe’s best-known startups, with more than 100m registered users worldwide. Last year the company reported profitability for the first time, with revenue hitting €596.3m, up 61% on the previous 12 months.
Now Lithuania’s first unicorn is looking to deploy some of that extra cash via Vinted Ventures, investing in other secondhand marketplaces — which have seen their popularity surge in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and spikes in consumer goods driven by inflation — and related businesses.
“Vinted is proof that it’s possible to successfully scale a tech business that’s both impactful and financially solid,” says CEO Thomas Plantenga. “The re-commerce space has enormous potential, hence we are excited to invest and grow startups that will ultimately benefit the wider market.”
Investing in re-commerce
While the company declined to share exactly how much capital had been allocated to the company’s new VC unit, it tells Sifted that Vinted Ventures will make up to three investments every year, focusing on growth-stage companies from Series A to C rounds, with cheques ranging from €500k to €10m.
“We want to back the companies that are working on accelerating re-commerce. We want to use the capital to help other companies actually tackle this market,” Milda Jasaitė, senior director of corporate development at Vinted, tells Sifted.
“They could be working on various solutions within re-commerce. It could be shipping solutions, payments, interesting technology that changes the way consumers approach secondhand. Anything along those lines is where we want to invest.”
Vinted Ventures will consist of six employees: four focused on deal sourcing and two on portfolio development, Jasaitė says.
Corporate venture capital
While it’s not unusual for Big Tech companies and other major corporations to move into VC — like Microsoft’s M12 or Google’s GV — Vinted Ventures is an outlier given its parent company’s relative size and very recent move into the green.
Irish-American fintech Stripe likewise only reached profitability in the past couple of years, but unlike Vinted counts its revenue in the billions. The company has been running its own accelerator programs designed to support up-and-coming startups since the mid-2010s.
Likewise, California-based crypto exchange Coinbase launched its own VC program in 2018, and boasts a portfolio of companies with a combined estimated value of around $40bn.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/vinted-ventures-buy-sell-app/
