The online wine retailer Tannico has today announced €3.8 million in Series A funding, led by P101 and including contributions from private investors Matteo de Brabant (founder of Jakala), Maurizio di Robilant (founder of Robilant Associati, the Italian market leader in brand advisory and design) and Stefano Saccardi (Board member and managing director at Campari).
After a €1.5 million seed round, the Milan-based startup was able to become one of the leaders within the Italian online wine market. The young company will now expand to the UK, offering an award-winning, exclusive and high quality wines from small wineries.
Founded in Italy in 2012 by Marco Magnocavallo, Tannico offers one of the most extensive catalogues of Italian wines in Europe with over 6,000 different labels from more than 1,000 wineries. In 2015 they also launched a section of the site dedicated to small producers (wineries with production under 150,000 bottles per year). These wineries produce high quality wines but due to their limited volumes, have typically struggled to acquire suitable distribution levels to enter both the Italian national and wider international market. Tannico has remedied this, opening up great opportunities for smaller producers and treating wine fans with new and exciting vinous beauties. Take Small Cellars’ Chianti as an example, it now sells 20% of its annual production through Tannico and is firmly within the top 10 best-selling wines on the website.
Tannico’s strength not only resides in it’s huge catalog of wines, but also in it’s customer service. Tannico utilises big data and artificial intelligence technologies in order to build a unique taste DNA of each customer and provide tailored one-to-one recommendations via their Automated Sommelier. So far, this strategy has worked well for Tannico, which now has more than 40,000 customers, sold 500,000 bottles in the last twelve months alone and has doubled its growth both in 2014 and 2015. Projections for 2016 are even stronger as the company taps into the UK’s market, worth an estimated £1 billion and other key markets worldwide.
Founder and CEO Marco Magnocavallo stated: “Tannico is solving two different problems. On one side, we have more than 100,000 wineries in Italy but only a few of them have access to distribution. On the other side of the market, traditional wine shops only have a small selection of bottles and it is virtually impossible for a shop to stock more than a few hundred different wines.”
Magnocavallo further explained: “We started Tannico with the aim of being the go-to platform for wineries to have access to the market and with a dream of building the largest selection of Italian wines in the world. We’ve now achieved that and with the help of our Series A funding we look forward to breaking into the UK market followed by Switzerland and France. By 2019, we aim to hit €40 million of revenues with a 5% EBITDA, offering the largest wine catalogue, great service and innovative technology including AI algorithms, personalisation and one-to-one emailing”.
