Trind Ventures led a 550k EUR seed round of Madrid-based startup Webel
Photo: The founding team of Webel
Reima Linnanvirta
Partner
trind.vc I Linkedin
+358 50 538 1606
Helsinki, Finland
**
Photo credit: Alex Azabache/ Unsplash;Trind VC
Everything is being brought to our homes: food, consumer goods… However, services (e.g., beauty) have not followed this path… yet. This is what Webel’s team found and, since then, they have been working on building a marketplace that would allow users to easily search, book and enjoy almost any service in the comfort of their homes.
For so, they have just raised €550K in a SAFE led by Trind Ventures to grow and expand. The SAFE has also been backed by Tiburon, a superangel fund from Daniel Wild and Felix Artmann, and other well-known business angels like Hugo Arévalo, founder of ThePowerMBA and investor in the 5 Spanish’s current/future unicorns like Glovo or Playtomic.
Webel was founded by Nacho, Carlos, Guillermo & Javier while at university. They suddenly realized that its impact was greater than expected: the app went viral at launch both for clients & professionals.
However, the real challenge was not about users’ needs, but building a model that could be profitable & scalable. Many other startups that had tried before struggled with this, mainly due to low client repetition caused by platform leakage (users disintermediating the platform for future services once they met).
Webel’s approach was simple. As Nacho Tejero, its CEO, says “If you want people to repeat their order through your platform (hence paying a commission), the value created for both parties for doing so (easier, faster, more comfortable…) has to be greater than the economic value (take rate) you are taking from the transaction. If not, people will go off-platform.”
With this approach, not only they built an app where clients can book their services in 5 clicks, but also worked around creating value for their supply. For that, they built SaaS tools for them (e.g., Calendar, notifications, automated invoices…) to easily manage their services, as well as an algorithm that would compare the professional’s repetition with its peers and reward most loyal suppliers with higher visibility and a lower commission. And it worked incredibly well: on average, each customer currently books ~8 services a year, which resulted in being +75% of their GMV coming from repeat customers.
Despite having grown 23% monthly for 13 consecutive months, they “do not have enough”. As Nacho says, “now it’s time to bring Webel to millions of people’s hands, one by one. We have proved our model to be profitable & scalable, and with the funds raised, we want to achieve a larger scale. We will be soon expanding into new markets like Italy or Portugal.” They started in Madrid, but have already expanded into Barcelona, which already represents 15% of their total GMV thanks to a 55% MoM growth for the past 4 months, and their goal is “to become the global market leader. We are going to create the biggest company in our sector”.
“We believe in Webel’s data-driven team. They have great energy and are focusing on the right problems of scaling the services marketplace. It’s indeed an incredibly challenging sector, but Webel seems to have solved it and therefore created a huge opportunity with it” - Peeter Kompus, Investment Manager at Trind Ventures
The news comes as Webel crosses the 3,000 services delivered per month thanks to massive growth in the past weeks.
More information:
Nacho Tejero, CEO, Webel
itejero@webel.es, +34 606 090 505
Reima Linnanvirta
Partner
trind.vc I Linkedin
+358 50 538 1606
Helsinki, Finland
**
Photo credit: Alex Azabache/ Unsplash;Trind VC