Cojita — a two-sided e-commerce wholesale marketplace that largely targets retailers in the health and beauty sectors — raised €80 million ($86 million) in a Series B round led by Dawn Capital and Accel of London. The company plans to use the cash to expand into more categories.
Previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners and LocalGlobe also participated. Qogita has now raised a total of €119 million.
Qogita targets small and medium-sized e-commerce companies that want to engage with an “all-in-one” wholesale platform, not dissimilar to Faire.com in the US (which has raised $1.7 billion to date) and anchorstore From France (which raised 365 million euros).
Qogita was co-founded by London-based Danny Toledano, formerly of Goldman Sachs. One of its founders was Yaniv Toledano, the former president of Isramco, an oil and gas exploration company operating in the United States and Israel. As the names indicate, the founders are father and son. New CEO Manolis Manassakis, Uber’s former director of EMEA operations, joined just this year to take the company to what appears to be the next level.
A request to interview Toledano was denied. “It takes a different set of skills to build and scale a company from the ground up,” a company spokesperson said in an email. “With the fundraising and ambitious goals, the consensus was that someone with experience scaling markets would be best suited to move the company forward.”
The company began 2021 with an “Amazon-like” acquisition of this time-strewn sector. It handles the end-to-end process, including shipping and delivery. It also has a BNPL platform for SMEs facing cash flow issues.
“We are a marketplace where you can think of us as a two-sided market: buyers, retailers, sellers or wholesalers, distributors and brands,” Manasakis told me over a phone call.
“Why have the B2B markets had such a difficult time?” he said. “The incentive to exit the platform is very high. In our case, we pair a single buyer with multiple sellers. The order itself is divided into parts, based on the inventory of that moment, the price at that moment, available quantities, minimum quantities, fulfillment rate, and quality.” … 10 different variables. So it’s impossible for a buyer to replicate the value that we have, because the answer to what is the best possible vehicle changes every five minutes — and that’s what we do.”
He said the founders started an e-commerce company on Amazon and realized that “by far the biggest problem they had was buying goods from sellers, versus everything else. So we moved into this existing business. And that’s how the discovery happened.”
He says there is no “direct competitor” but that Faire, Anchorstore and Alibaba are his closest competitors.
Ankerstore was contacted for comment but did not respond by press time.
“It is remarkable how complex and completely opaque product procurement remains for small and medium-sized businesses targeting the $6 trillion e-commerce market,” Norman Fiore, general partner at Dawn Capital, said in a statement. Qogita has built a comprehensive platform to handle the entire bulk purchasing process.
Luca Bocchio, Partner at Accel, also added: “The B2B wholesale market in Europe is huge, but also fragmented and complex. Currently, trade is done in an inefficient and non-digital way, and Cogeta has the opportunity to become a digital enabler for the entire value chain, providing More efficiency and transparency to the notorious gray market.
Cogeta Team
The market for providing these one-click services to SME retailers is growing significantly as the broader sector transitions to digital. The global health and beauty market is expected to be the same He deserves $785 billion by 2025
And in April, Anchorage Launched New membership program for independent retailers in Europe, removing minimum payment amounts and waiving heavy/fragile shipping fees, as well as offering a 90-day BNPL.
Last year, it raised a $283 million Series C funding round led by Bond and Tiger Global, but it has not escaped the need to… Cuts Jobs in this market are tougher to raise capital.