Rudyard Kipling once famously said, “Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.” Gardening can be immensely satisfying but incredibly strenuous. The pandemic-driven lockdowns have driven several people around the world towards gardening, be it indoors or outdoors — windowsills to acres of plots.
The hard work involved generally demotivates many amateur/aspiring gardeners. This is where UK-based Sproutl wants to help. Sproutl is a gardening tech start-up that aims to open up gardening to a whole new generation of gardeners and get everyone to plant something.
New marketplace & funding
Today, Sproutl has announced that it has launched a curated online marketplace and raised $9M (nearly €7.63M) in seed funding led by Index Ventures. Ada Ventures also participated in this round, along with C-Suite angel investors from leading global tech companies, including Farfetch, Airbnb, Made.com, and Slack.
According to the company, this curated marketplace offers gardening products and plants from the country’s leading independent garden centres, nurseries and shops.
Founded in 1996, Index Ventures is a European VC firm based in London, San Francisco and Geneva. This month, the VC firm announced that it has raised a colossal $3.1B (approx €2.63B) across three funds recently to invest in emerging startups and existing portfolio companies. It has backed companies such as Dropbox, Etsy, Farfetch, Patreon and Deliveroo.
Sproutl claims that the funds will be used for the launch of the platform and its expansion, as well as expanding its team.
Demystifying gardening
According to Sproutl, it is not just an online gardening marketplace. “It’s a platform that provides inspiration and advice to a new generation of growers, demystifying gardening, making it accessible and fun to fresh new audiences who may never have grown anything before, bringing plants and products seamlessly from phone to door,” reads the press release.
For the consumers, the company claims to make shopping hassle-free, whereas, for horticultural suppliers, it helps with online selling and integrate with their systems. Along with online marketing and customer services, Sproutl claims to take care of logistics, packaging sourcing, and delivery. Thereby helping local garden centres, shops and nurseries to increase their sales by developing their online presence and reach new national audiences.
The seed for Sproutl
The idea behind Sproutl originated when former VP Trading and Strategy, Marketing at Farfetch, Anni Noel-Johnson, wanted to plant her small London garden. After browsing through online options, she found that “they typically catered for an informed, mature audience and had huge variations in availability and delivery lead times.”
After leaving Farfetch, she joined forces with former colleague Andy Done (who had previously been Director of Data Engineering at Farfetch and headed up data analytics at King, makers of the hit game Candy Crush) to launch Sproutl. Bestselling gardening author Hollie Newton joined the team as the Chief Creative Officer.
“We built Sproutl to invite a new audience to take up gardening and give them the world-class eCommerce experience that digital natives expect. Our mission is to demystify growing plants and remove the barriers to getting started.” They continued, “We want to celebrate the UK’s brilliant horticultural industry and the network of family-owned and independent businesses, bringing their plants and products together in one place, generating incremental sales to new nationwide audiences,” comments Anni Noel-Johnson, CEO, & Andy Done, CTO.
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