Aiming to give small and medium-sized businesses more ammo in the competition against ecommerce giants, 35up has just secured €5 million. The Berlin-based startup is empowering SMEs with enhanced cross-selling opportunities to generate new revenue streams.
While the online retail and ecommerce space is continuing to grow as consumers increasingly look for digital retail experiences, it’s a sector that is constantly gaining new players and actors. It means the competition is fierce and standing out from the crowd is getting tougher and tougher. At the same time, small and medium-sized companies have to come up against giant marketplaces who have vast resources to cater to any and all changing consumer demands and needs – regardless of how swiftly they change.
To help SMEs compete on a more even playing field, by giving them the tools to unlock the potential of cross-selling, 35up has just scored a new investment and is planning to level up its product offering.
Funding details
35up has just announced the raise of €5 million a year after closing its first funding round. Capnamic leads the funding round. The company’s 2021 raise was led by Dieter von Holtzbrinck Ventures alongside coparion and other investors.
Fabian Louis, the Managing Director of 35up stated: “We are very happy to welcome Capnamic among our investors and look forward to expanding our team and to investing in sales and product in particular. Our goal is to democratize cross-selling and to help smaller web shops avoid losing their customers to the big online marketplaces.”
Competing with cross-selling
Founded in 2020, the Berlin-based startup is aiming to help online merchants create cross-selling revenue streams without any inventory risks or working capital investments. The vision is to improve competitiveness in the ecommerce space and create more convenient shopping experiences for consumers.
Large marketplaces like Amazon generate up to 35% of their sales with cross-selling (t- just think of the number of times you’ve added something extra to the cart at the last minute, tempted by seeing what other customers also bought, or seeing a pair of shoes that perfectly match a new outfit.
The ability to cross-sell quite as efficiently as the ecommerce titans has been closed off to smaller merchants – it’s difficult to implement, requiring booths sophisticated product matching technology and a large (and costly) inventory. It meant these large enterprises have monopolized the game. But 35up wants to change that.
The disruptive team have developed an innovative platform that enables every webshop to cross-sell – without the risk of inventory and the labour-intensive onboarding of new products. The headless API recognizes products in the shopping cart of a webshop and uses the algorithm-based recommendation engine, to suggest suitable cross-selling items from the product range of affiliated vendors for purchase, which are then delivered directly to shoppers. For them, this means a more convenient shopping experience, and for the retailer a larger shopping cart volume
It means that by using 35up, every online shop has the ability to increase sales and margins by up to 35%.
Now with this new funding, the startup will be able to expand its team and power up its mission to democratize ecommerce. Taking on the giants of the industry is no small task and it’ll be interesting how this software changes the game.
Christian Knott, Managing Partner at Capnamic: “35up’s platform is a powerful solution and already generates considerable additional sales for existing customers. We are therefore pleased to accompany the experienced founders going forward. We believe that 35up can bring substantial profitable sales to both web shops and the connected vendor network and that breaking the exclusivity of cross-selling will create revolutionary opportunities for e-commerce.”
