Creating a business intelligence platform dedicated to SME ecommerce brands, Klar has today announced a €2.3 million seed funding round and officially launches.
The funding for the Munich-based startup was led by Cherry Ventures and is backed by notable entrepreneurs and angel investors such as Benedikt Sauter (Xentral), Moritz Weisbrodt (Alaiko), Malte Horeyseck (SellerX), Samir El-Sabini (Juni), Benjamin Kremer (YFood) plus the founders of Moss, DTC Ventures as well as OMR, Europe’s leading marketing conference.
Klar was founded with the ambition to become the single source of truth for SME ecommerce brands, generating valuable actionable insights to fuel growth. Founders, Maximilian Rast, Cillié Burger, and Frank Birzle, have 10 years of history working together and all have operating experience in scaling ecommerce companies, data science and data security – bringing a wealth of expertise and know-how.
The idea for Klar emerged during Max’s time at YFood, where he was looking for a tool to manage the company’s data – and found that there just wasn’t one up to the task. Klar was developed to provide a single source of truth that reflects the reality of how the business operates – addressing a gap in ecommerce data ops. Max also needed a tool that provides insights and highlights opportunities while also being affordable and quick to set up – enter Klar.
Max Rast explained: “With our unified, yet customizable data model we can reflect the reality our customers operate in and, in turn, provide them with accurate reports, meaningful benchmarks and detailed insights. But that’s just the start. Klar is not just a data tool but will become the central operating system for eCommerce brands. Shopify has armed the rebels. We will now turn them into an army that powers itself by providing insights, knowledge, and direction.”
The ecommerce market is booming across Europe. In today’s DTC ecommerce landscape, tens of thousands of smaller independent brands, serving specific verticals and communities exist in parallel to large incumbents like Amazon. They vitally need a tool that can help them take on these giants and fend for themselves. SMEs cannot afford a full business intelligence team and therefore still rely on spreadsheets or Google Data Studio for their reporting. Klar specifically addresses those companies’ needs.
Cillié Burger explained: “Our goal with Klar is to provide 95% of eCommerce brands with 95% of the value a world-class in-house team could generate, in 5% of the time and cost.”
After starting out with only a few brands, Klar’s closed beta quickly grew to over 80 companies, and so, the business launched today with brands like Snocks, Every Foods, and Mammaly relying on the detailed and actionable insights the platform provides. There’s also already a waitlist.
By extracting and aggregating data from all their relevant third-party data sources, Klar helps brands to get a transparent understanding of their financials, customers’ purchase patterns, and their marketing efficiency across all channels.
The fresh capital will go mainly into further developing the product, specifically addressing the daily needs of the management and marketing teams of ecommerce companies. Klar is also investing heavily in the expansion of its data science and engineering team.
Christian Meerman, Cherry Ventures founding partner and ex-Zalando CMO commented: “We’re so excited Max, Cillié and Frank joined forces again to build Klar. They know firsthand the struggles that brands face as they try to gain valuable insights into their data and growth journey. s eCommerce sales continue to rapidly grow, achieving data fluency and transparency is a must. We believe Klar’s vertical and dedicated approach will ultimately replace a lot of the horizontal software out there that brands currently have to stitch together.”
