Flip.ro, the Romanian refurbished phones online marketplace, received a €1.5M investment from eMAG Ventures, the CVC of eMAG Group, an e-commerce market leader in CEE.
GapMinder, a venture capital fund that invests in Romanian and CEE companies at Seed or Series A stage, sold its stake in the startup to eMAG Ventures. The VC has invested €150K in Flip.ro in two rounds of funding, the first one through the accelerator program Techaccelerator.
eMAG Ventures bought a 42.26% stake at Flip.ro’s from minority stakeholders for an undisclosed amount. This is the third investment for Flip.ro, which had previously raised €370K in funding.
Fast track for Flip.ro
Flip.ro was founded by George Moroianu, Alin Luca, and Alex Burghelia in 2019. It helps customers sell their old phones and aids other users acquire vetted products safely. Discover more about their circular economy solution in a previous interview with George Moroianu for The Recursive.
Moroianu says in the press release that the growth of Flip.ro has been beyond the team’s expectation, but this encourages them to aim higher. Now the team is looking to expand to Central and Eastern Europe and to become one of the important players in the field.
Flip.ro’s founders are targeting €14M turnover in 2021, an exponential growth from €2.5 million in 2020. They plan to double their team to 100 employees by the summer of 2022.
“We see this development as an extraordinary achievement in the course of a Romanian early-stage start-up that, with the right team, vision and backers, in just two years and through two rounds of funding, gets to demonstrate the importance and profitability of pre-seed and seed investments”, said Cristian Dascalu, Techcelerator co-founder and GapMinder partner.
The partnership with eMAG
In addition to the €1.5M funding, Flip.ro can also get know-how from eMAG’s experience in accelerating technology businesses on an international scale.
Back in May, Bogdan Axinia, the managing director of eMAG Ventures, shared with The Recursive that eMAG Ventures is interested in tech B2C businesses with a circular economy model because these are their areas of expertise and they are looking for solutions that can help their core business.
“I would like to stay beside some great entrepreneurs and projects that could bring value to the ecosystem, for the customers and the employees,” Axinia shared in the interview.
Dan Mihaescu, a founding partner of GapMinder Venture Partners, believes that through this partnership Flip.ro has the potential to turn into a very big company in just two or three years.
