As people have started to adjust to the effects of Covid-19, alcohol e-commerce sales have grown immensely around the world. It is estimated that by 2024, it will exceed $40B (approx €33.25M). With this reference, California-based Vivino, a wine app and marketplace has secured $155M (approx €128.8M) in its Series D round of funding.
Heini Zachariassen, the co-founder of Vivino, credits the company’s growth to this continued shift in consumer behaviour. He says, “Our user retention rates are high, and we’re seeing a steady conversion of app users to wine buyers. That’s a good move in the right direction. By creating more value for our users, we also create more value for the company and industry at large.”
This round brings Vivino’s total funds raised to date to $221M (approx €183.7M) and includes a mix of primary and secondary investment.
Investors in this deal
The investment was led by Swedish investment firm Kinnevik, including a new investor Sprints Capital. Besides, the round also saw participation from GP Bullhound and existing early-stage investor Creandum.
Use of the funds
The company says as its online wine sales are rapidly increasing, the raised capital will the company to focus on select markets with the greatest potential for growth, including the US, Germany, the UK, Italy, Japan, and Portugal.
Besides, the new capital will also enable Vivino to improve its core technology and artificial intelligence (AI) platform to create better and more personalised recommendations for Vivino users.
Zachariassen says, “This round has raised important capital for our rapidly growing company and drawn some exceptional new leaders to our board. The funding will enable us to continue to build on our core strengths, expand industry partnerships drawing more merchants and wineries to our marketplace, and support our continued global growth.”
Everything about the wine marketplace app
Vivino was founded in 2010 by Heini Zachariassen and Theis Søndergaard. The company is a developer of a wine recommendation and marketplace app used to view ratings and buy wines anywhere.
Through Vivino.com and the Vivino app, users can discover and purchase wine based on their individual scanning, rating and purchase behaviour, and community recommendations, making wine discovery fun, accessible, and easy to understand.
With the Vivino app, one can simply click a photo of any wine label or restaurant wine list and Vivino’s proprietary image recognition technology will provide ratings, reviews, and average pricing for that bottle instantly.
The company currently boasts a community of 50 million wine enthusiasts and has over 700 marketplace partners worldwide. It has posted a 100 per cent annual growth rate for the last seven years and a 103 per cent increase in year-over-year sales in 2020.
