After raising $54m in a Series B funding round, European online electronics marketplace Refurbed is planning to invest in Ireland with a war chest of €10m earmarked.
As part of its international expansion after raising $54m in a Series B funding round, European online electronics marketplace Refurbed intends to increase its presence in Ireland and will contribute €10m towards its market growth here.
The latest $54m investment was led by Evli Growth Partners and Almaz Capital. They are joined by existing investors such as Speedinvest, Bonsai Partners and All Iron Ventures, as well as a group of new backers — Hermes GPE, C4 Ventures, SevenVentures, Alpha Associates, Monkfish Equity (Trivago Founders), Kreos Capital, Isomer Capital and Creas Impact Fund.
“We founded Refurbed with a mission to get at least one refurbished device into every household in Europe, thus changing the way we consume electronic devices as a society”
Refurbed is a Vienna-headquartered online marketplace for refurbished electronics that are tested and renewed in up to 40 steps, effectively functioning like their new counterparts. Being up to 40% cheaper with a minimum 12-month warranty included, refurbed makes purchasing sustainable devices easy, affordable and risk-free.
In 2020, Refurbed grew by 300pc and reached more than €100m in gross merchandise value (GMV). The company continues to improve its operations by implementing new quality assurance measures and pricing algorithms, which effectively enables refurbed to offer high-quality devices at a low price tag.
Low carbon mission
The electronics industry is one of the largest industries in the world and emits copious tons of CO2 per year — for reference, the total annual carbon footprint of manufacturing mobile phones equals to at least the annual carbon emissions of a small country.
This has a significant contribution to both climate change and the e-waste challenge (the 50m tonnes of e-waste generated every year will more than double to 110 million tonnes by 2050). WEF experts state that repairing – not recycling – is the first step to tackling this issue.
The team behind Refurbed contributes to solving the problem — since the launch of the marketplace in 2017, the company has already saved 170 tons worth of electronic devices and subsequently managed to reduce the CO2 impact by 31,000 tons.
“We founded Refurbed with a mission to get at least one refurbished device into every household in Europe, thus changing the way we consume electronic devices as a society,” said Peter Windischhofer, co-founder of Refurbed.
“We’re extremely proud of the results we were able to achieve thus far and are set to keep on growing internationally to become the Amazon for refurbished products in Europe.“
Refurbed operates in Germany, Austria, Ireland, France, Italy and Poland, with three other countries to be branched out to until the end of 2021.
The company has over 11,000 listed products on its marketplace from 130+ merchants and currently employs more than 120 people.
To date, Refurbed has sold over 800,000 products through its platform, planting one tree in Haiti, Madagascar, Kenya, Indonesia, Mozambique or Nepal for every device sold.
Main image at top: Refurbed founders Kilian Kaminski, Jürgen Riedl and Peter Windischhofer
