Dutch scale-up Helloprint seals ‘multi-million’ investment from Bregal, Project A

Remember Helloprint? Not only did they bank €3M last year from a group investors and won the prestigious Rising Star Award, they’ve also hit around €30M in revenue last year within three years of inception. To continue their quest to take a chunk out of Vistaprint’s reign in the online printing market, the Rotterdam-based scale-up banked ‘multi-millions’. 

Brenninkmeijer

Investors are Bregal Unternehmerkapital, a €550M euro fund backed by the C&A family Brenninkmeijer, and Project A, a Berlin-based operational venture capitalist that also participates in Catawiki and Treatwell (exited). The partnership entails a “multi-million” euro minority investment via their printing holding Onlineprinters. The partnership entails a ‘multi-million’ euro minority investment via their printing holding Onlineprinters. To have the wealthiest family of the Netherlands invest in your company is quite an achievement for CEO Hans Scheffer, who previously exited Flyerzone to UK-based Grafenia for €2M.

Series A

The Rotterdam-based platform’s last funding round was a multi-million euro Series A funding with informal investors, after a first round of founding capital. This new investment provides Helloprint with significant funding and access to multiple strategic advantages to support its rapid growth ambitions.

Right future partner

“We’ve had a long and intensive process of selecting the right future partner for our fast growing European platform business”, said Scheffer, CEO and founder of Helloprint. “The family-owned structure, long term vision and hands-on mentality of Bregal and the operational power in data, BI, CRM and online acquisition marketing of Project A have convinced us to go for a joint future. This unique combination allows us to grow our independent platform faster into various markets.”

Business cards and booklets

Helloprint is using the funding for the operational support of its growth, the development of its systems and data structure, the extension of the team and the acquisition of new European customers. The startup aims to hit €100M revenue in the next few years by expanding to the rest of Europe. Now, they already cover eight countries, including UK, Spain and France, and serve 150.000 customers with over 2.000 unique printed products, ranging from business cards, booklets, ballons and brochures.

Almost a trillion

As the entire market for printing is expected to hit almost a TRILLION in dollars by 2018, not even 1 percent is considered to take place online. “We see that the online print market is evolving rapidly”, Scheffer says. “Our asset-light platform model allows us to scale the business faster and enter new countries and markets quickly without the need for investments in printing equipment. Our network of international print and promo producers is growing fast and it is our ambitions to scale the network and our business even faster over the next years.”

Image above: Hans Scheffer to the far left