The Order : Weekly Aggregator Roundup - Rainforest, Dwarfs & Telos
Chart of the week
The Practical Ecommerce this week covered how Amazon's sales have overtaken Walmart. While missing the 2020 numbers, Prime which is available in 22 countries today showed a growth rate of 33% between Q1-2019 and Q1-2021.
New funding this week: $57M
Funding Craze 💰
APAC: Rainforest raises a $20M USD "pre-series A" led by Monk Capital to accelerate the growth beyond it's current 6 brand acquisitions [Techcrunch]
EU: Dutch-based Dwarfs adds 30M EUR (~35M USD) as credit facility led by North Wall Capital [Private Equity Wire]
US: Telos Brands raises a 2.1M USD seed round led by Picus Capital [Business Wire]
Strategy 📈
🦄 The Packable/Pharmapacks success story continues - and is further great news for the ecosystem: "Amazon’s top third-party seller in U.S. plans to go public via SPAC" [CNBC]
A note on the relation of aggregators and Amazon: "Amazon aggregators are walking into the dragon’s cave" [The Financial Times]
Fueling the growth: "Prominent investors are starting to notice that they can get an ROI within 2 – 3 years and even faster with a proven growth strategy." - "The Amazon FBA Acquisition Gold Rush Is A Billion-Dollar Booming Industry" [Forbes]
A UK market seller story: "Specialist funds click on Amazon’s best sellers" [The Times]
Amazon European Brand Owner Summit, Sep 22-23 [VConfex]
Amazon is working on a new point-of-sale system to lure merchants from Shopify, Square, and PayPal [Business Insider]
Going beyond Amazon: "Brands are Branching Out from the Amazon Marketplace" [Retail Touchpoints]
Growing competition in Europe: "Shopee may enter Poland to start its European expansion" [Tech in Asia]
Alibaba.com Debuts New Dropshipping Tools, SMB Grants [PYMNTS]
Flipkart Boost: Flipkart launches programme to find and build D2C brands [Economic Times India]
Let's make this week count,
Christian