What the business is
A two-sided wholesale marketplace where SME e-commerce retailers buy mostly health and beauty goods from brands and distributors
The bet
SME retailers will buy from one all-in-one wholesale marketplace that splits a single cart across many sellers, with delivery and BNPL handled end to end
Starting capital
€80M ($86M) Series B led by Dawn Capital, taking total raised to €119M
How it started
The founders, Yaniv Toledano (ex-Goldman Sachs) and his father Danny Toledano, started an e-commerce business on Amazon and found that procuring goods from their suppliers was by far their biggest problem, so they switched to building the marketplace. It began operating in 2021.
What happened
Manolis Manassakis, a former Uber EMEA operations director, joined as COO in 2021 and became CEO in 2023. A company spokesperson said it takes a different skill set to scale a company than to build it from the ground up. The Series B funds expansion into more product categories. TechCrunch notes rivals Faire (raised $1.7B) and Ankorstore (€365M), and that B2B marketplaces have had a tough time with crowding and margin pressure.
What has to be true
The founders found procurement from sellers was the biggest problem in their Amazon business
Fragmented, undigitized wholesale trade in Europe left room for an all-in-one platform, per investors
Investors and the company said scaling a marketplace needs different skills than founding one
What can be applied
Manassakis argued the marketplace's defense against off-platform deals is order splitting: the best cart changes every five minutes across about 10 variables, which a buyer cannot replicate.
Aftermath
As of December 2023 Qogita planned to expand into more product categories with the new Series B funding and was led by outside CEO Manolis Manassakis.
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