E-commerce platform Nuvemshop raises R$500 million from investors

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The investment round, led by funds Accel Partners, ThornTree Capital Kaszek, Qualcomm Ventures, and investor Kevin Efrusy, comes just five months after a previous funding of US$30 million.

The company did not disclose how much it valued with the new funding, but says the deal makes it one of the country’s next unicorns, market jargon used for startups with a market value of US$1 billion.

Created in 2010, Nuvemshop today has a network of about 75,000 tenants spread across Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. With the new contribution, it plans to expand this year to Colombia, Chile and Peru.

Unlike giants such as Amazon.com (AMZN) and Mercado Libre, which have set up their own logistics and finance structures and have increasingly invested in their own content and services, Nuvemshop uses a system that allows shopkeepers to choose their own partners for deliveries and payments.

“And we operate as a white label, so shopkeepers reinforce their own brands,” Santiago Sosa, president and co-founder of Nuvemshop, told Reuters. “The marketplace makes sellers feel like a commodity.”

Although it has its own payments arm, Nuvem Pago, which is expected to be strengthened now with the injection of cash, Sosa says the service is only an option for customers looking for lower fees than those charged by rivals to advance receivables.

With the new resources, Nuvemshop also intends to accelerate the attraction of shopkeepers and ride the wave of digital commerce in Brazil, which, according to experts, should last for many years.

According to industry figures, e-commerce accounted for about 10% of Brazilian retail sales in 2020, double the previous year, driven by social isolation to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. But the perspective of experts is that this evolution will continue in the coming years, until it reaches a similar level to China, where it reached 50% of sales.

“We expect to grow more than 20 times in the next 5 years,” said Sosa, predicting for this year that Nuvemshop will record R$7 billion in customer sales in Latin America, double that recorded in 2020, which grew 280% over 2019.

More immediately, the company’s plan involves expanding its staff, currently at 400, to 2,000 by 2023. With resources from another fundraising later on, it also plans to develop its own logistics structure, while preparing to list shares in the United States.

Source: Moneytimes