Dutch online print platform Helloprint has just announced that it closed its first round of funding with a group of investors, members of the management team and the Dutch tech investor Gert Jan Munneke. In total the investors have poured €3 million into the company. Up until now the company has been entirely funded by the founders themselves.
Helloprint was founded in 2013. It’s an online print platform with operations in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, UK and Spain. The company deploys three brand names: Helloprint, Drukzo and iDrukker (druk translates to print). Two of its offices are in Rotterdam, one in Valencia (Spain). Annually, over 100,000 companies and consumers are ordering printed products and marketing materials from one of the group’s 40 online stores. The organisation has grown by 3,000% in the past three years and is expected to achieve revenues of approximately €30 million in 2016. At the beginning of this year, the company was nominated as the second fastest-growing e-commerce company in the Netherlands and one of Deloitte’s Rising Stars. Scheffer is now on a mission to build an even more succesfull company with a projected €100 million in revenue by 2019.
CEO and co-founder Hans Scheffer (34) states he had not necessarily been seeking an investor, but was convinced by Munneke’s expertise and passion: “We are regularly approached by parties that would like to have a stake in Helloprint, but up until now we couldn’t find the right one. By no means we were looking for an investor that merely wants to inject money into Helloprint, but considering that we can finance our own growth independently. We were looking for an investor with entrepreneurial vision and spirit, who contributes expertise, knows what it’s like to go through a period of enormous growth and who, above all, is very familiar with the online media landscape. That’s exactly the kind of entrepreneurial investor that Gert Jan is.”
The investment in amount of € 3 million underpins Helloprint’s status as one of the Netherlands’ fastest-growing startups. Helloprint plans to devote this newly acquired capital purely to fuel growth and expansion. Scheffer himself and the Strategic Advisory Board plan to develop Helloprint from its current team of 100 people staff and portals in 5 countries to 150 employees and 13 countries by the end of this year.
Gert Jan Munneke explains his decision to invest: “The top reason for me to invest in Helloprint is its exceptional team. As an investor, I’ve come across all kinds of companies, but with Helloprint I found a rare combination of energy, talent and execution. In an online world, where nothing is unique and anything that succeeds is immediately copied, the most important thing of all is that you ultimately have the best team. And that’s what Helloprint has. That’s also why I am convinced that Helloprint will chieve its international ambitions.”
