The notified economy – where consumers are both suppliers and buyers of goods and services – moved into its own in the last years of the lockdown as a popular and trusted way to buy and sell goods. Now one of the biggest players in that system – the clothing and home furnishings marketplace Vinted – is spinning in a very big money cycle of its own.
The European startup is announcing today it has closed the overall equity round of €250 million ($303 million at today’s rate), giving the company a pre-paid value of €3.5 billion $4.2 billion, or $4.5 million later). The fund is led by EQT Growth, with stakeholders including Accel, Burda Principal Investments, Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sprints Capital – all previous backers. This is a big leap for Vintage, which was valued at $1 billion in its round at the end of 2019.
This, of course, was just before the epidemic hit – a sign that last year had positively affected both Vintage and the entire business model. This is a huge deal for the company as well as for the country that produced the startup. Founded in 2008 in Vilnius, Lithuania, Vinted has operations across 13 markets – France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom and the United States. Funding to double as it moves deeper into a lower market. Overall, across that footprint, Vintage currently has about 45 million users (a clear number in this case: 45 million = $4.5 billion worth) who upload their own clothing or household items to sell or upload what others have uploaded.
The user pays no fee for listing, but Vintage charges a “buyer protection” rate of 3% to 8% of the price of an item or a direct cut (in the UK – between £0.03 and £0.08) depending on good quality. The circular economy is often thought of as an effective system that not only helps people to get more life out of things in a sustainable way, but also gives people better deals by cutting something else from retail discipline.
It was a very strong idea last year, where people are spending more time at home and looking to reduce those spaces, either out of work and to make extra money or save some money, or just rethinking how the world works and we Trying to do a small part of how I got where I was today and how to connect with their community in a different way.
