Founded by ex-Apple employees, Utrecht-based Vev bags €5M to make entrepreneurship accessible

Utrecht-based Vev, a software platform that helps entrepreneurs start a business, announced on Tuesday that it has raised €5M from Notion Capital and Point Nine Capital. 

A UK study reveals that 28 per cent of would-be entrepreneurs were put off launching a business due to the complexity involved with starting a company. 

The Dutch platform intends to alleviate this burden

Vev: What you need to know

The company was founded by former Apple employees Michel Elings, Jeroen Janssen, and Thijs Zoon to make entrepreneurship accessible to everyone in one place. 

Vev provides  aspiring entrepreneurs a platform with  ready-made and industry-specific software and payment tracking. 

The company says it provides founders with tools that can help them launch over 100 businesses ranging from restaurateurs to dog walkers. 

Michel Elings, CEO and co-founder of Vev explains, “Starting a business can be overwhelming, which causes potential entrepreneurs to stop before they’ve even begun. That’s exactly what we want to change at Vev.” 

He adds, “We have created the first platform that people can run any type of business on. We are still building out our catalogue of business types, and we will work with a founder in any industry to support their business”

The Dutch company has acquired inputs from over 350 business owners to understand their problems and aims to fix them through softwares. 

Vev says its platform can be tailored according to the needs and provides a broad range of services and advice: from auto-suggesting the next appointment for a haircut, tailored to a customer’s schedule, to optimising the delivery routes of pizza couriers to streamline business operations.

Elings says Vev’s catalogue will grow to over 250 business types, to fulfil the ambitions of its growing user base. 

The Investors

Point Nine is a European early-stage venture capital firm focused on B2B SaaS and B2B marketplace startups in Europe and North America.

Ricardo Sequerra from Point Nine adds, “Vev is capturing the workflow of merchants across verticals and over time will disrupt not only pen and paper but ultimately the physical POS with a software-only approach. The horizontality of the tool also enables Vev to cater to very underserved segments who haven’t been the focus of traditional software vendors.” 

Notion Capital is a European B2B SaaS and cloud VC with more than $700M in assets under management, and more than 80 investments to date. 

Chris Tottman from Notion says, “Vev provides a “business in a box” software for the self-employed, a global market of nearly 3 billion users. We’ve been very impressed by their deep understanding of their target audience and how it translated into a powerful yet highly intuitive product.”