Swappie bets refurbished iPhones go mainstream; first full-year EBITDA profit

Swappie, founded in Helsinki in August 2016 by Sami Marttinen and Jiri Heinonen, buys used iPhones, rebuilds them through a 52-step process in its own refurbishment centers, and resells them with a warranty through its own marketplace. The founding trigger was personal: Marttinen was scammed buying a used smartphone online and found many others in the same situation, with no safe, standardized option for buying refurbished.

The bet was that consumers would treat a refurbished iPhone like a used car bought from a dealer rather than a classifieds gamble: standardized quality, warranty, and brand trust could make refurbishment a mainstream way to upgrade. To make that credible, Swappie vertically integrated the entire chain instead of running a peer-to-peer marketplace, and backed the strategy with a EUR 35.8M Series B in 2020 and a $124M Series C led by Verdane in February 2022.

Scale brought pain: in early 2023 up to 290 jobs were at risk as Swappie moved refurbishment out of Finland to Tallinn and Leipzig, and it tightened operations before stabilizing. By December 2024 it had passed two million customers. In 2025 it sold close to 650K devices, roughly 250K people sold their phones to Swappie, and the company posted its first full-year EBITDA profit of EUR 2.5M on revenue of EUR 249M (+20%).

In 2026 the company extended its bet beyond phones, adding AirPods in March and refurbished MacBooks on August 31, a category it had piloted in Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark. Exploding Topics' September 2026 ranking lists Swappie as the top trending startup in its technology category, with 823K monthly searches.