Amsterdam-based SaaS-enabled marketplace for companies to get short-term jobs done quickly, blackbear, announced that it has raised funding from VC firm No Such Ventures. The company didn’t disclose the funding value.
The Dutch company says it will use the investment to grow its team, improve the online platform, and expand internationally.
Stefan Hoogenboom, co-founder of blackbear, says, “Expectations for the next few years are high. This capital injection allows us to accelerate commercially, technologically, and internationally. We managed to build a business of around 45 FTE with a very satisfied and ever-growing customer and solver base on limited financial means. Now, having No Such Ventures on board as our first formal investor, we’re ready to grow even faster!”
blackbear: What you need to know
Joep Wittebrood and Stefan Hoogenboom founded blackbear in 2019 with their combined experiences in the corporate world at Red Bull and Kempen & Co, and the global rise of the “Gig Economy” in the labour market.
Through blackbear, companies can easily outsource tasks and projects at competitive prices.
For a fixed fee, companies can gain access to blackbear’s marketplace, where they can post an unlimited number of challenges that may vary from delivering visualisations, performing market analysis to creating APIs, deploying data/dashboarding, and more.
blackbear says starters and young professionals can apply for a challenge that matches their skills and, upon being selected, deliver the requested work product within two to four weeks time.
The Dutch company offers customer and solver support throughout their user journey.
To date, the company has grown to 6,000+ registered Solvers and 100+ paying customers ranging from scale-ups to global companies across industries, such as Toyota, Heijmans, T-mobile, Stryker, Louwman, and the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure & Water Management.
Joep Wittebrood says, “After several early pivots, we’ve successfully grown our current model over these past eighteen months. Our traction has been tremendous: we managed to reach a fivefold increase in our monthly revenue and our customer base has quadrupled in the past year.”
Investor
Based out of Amsterdam, No Such Ventures has expertise in scaling marketplace models and international expansion.
Sophie Heijenberg, an investor at No Such Ventures, says, “We were immediately impressed with the growth blackbear has achieved to date. They have come up with a unique proposition and managed to build an outstanding platform that cleverly responds to trends within the changing job market and the way of working of new generations. We look forward to working together!”
