Our €55M Series B funding to empower e-commerce businesses

Hi there! Rob, Stefan, and Robert here – co-founders at Channable. We’d love to tell you all about why we raised this funding round, what we plan to do with the money, and what it means for you. But first, let’s go back in time to explain why Channable exists in the first place.

We started Channable in 2014 on a simple premise: empowering online retailers with easy-to-use technology to reach their customers across any channel and market. We wanted to do this by delivering the right information to the right channel, at the right time, efficiently, and at scale.

Almost 8 years ago today, the Channable team looked slightly different. With only a few team members working from an office within the University of Utrecht, not only did we grow organically to almost 30 people when we had our first investment in 2016, but we’ve seen first-hand how the product has evolved, how the company has grown, and how our team has thrived over the years.

Fast forward to today, and we couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve all achieved together. We just ended 2021 with a team of 175, more than 30 nationalities, a brand new HQ in Utrecht, serving customers all over the globe, and operating from four countries including The Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and the US.

In the past years, we have already gained the trust of over 6,000 customers, and our infrastructure serves more than 55 billion items a day via more than 2,500 global channels including price comparison websites, marketplaces, search engines, and social networks.

Some of our latest features include the Channable Repricer, which helps you outperform the competition through real-time price adjustments, increase sales and optimize margins by winning the buy box, and Channable Insights, to increase the efficiency of your marketing campaigns as well as to boost your online sales.

This year, we want to continue shipping many more new features to help your business grow and become more productive.

An ever-evolving e-commerce landscape

In the past couple of years, the e-commerce landscape has undergone a major change since the arrival of COVID-19. As more brick-and-mortar businesses have migrated online, this digital transformation has accelerated e-commerce even more.

It made everyone more aware of the importance of online selling, pushing businesses to allocate a much higher contribution of online ad spend vs. offline – resulting in more revenue being driven by online sources.

With a new bar set for what is achievable online, market expectations have grown in correlation – particularly when it comes to online selling.

So it’s no secret that e-commerce marketing is no longer a competitive advantage—it’s now essential.

We’ve seen companies in every industry and across broad geographies begin the exact digital transformation we envisioned. These businesses are now pursuing growth by effectively selling, advertising, marketing, automating, and managing their online sales globally. Some of them include Vodafone, Bestseller, Decathlon, LVMH, Take Away, TUI, Norwegian Air Shuttle, Samsung, Carhartt, Holland and Barrett, Hunkemoller, Rituals, G-Star, Mediamarkt – and we’re happy to call them our customers.

Multiplying our ability to scale e-commerce marketing for brands, agencies, and retailers across the world

So why raise additional money now?

Robert, Stefan, and I have been looking at this for a little longer, but it was never needed to raise funds to accomplish the plans we had in terms of growth. Practically speaking, up until today, we managed to grow the company in an extremely capital-efficient way with only a raise of €750k in 2016. We now wanted to step up our game even more, and that made us decide to take this next step.

We are now fully prepared to take the next steps in our journey and bring the services that our current customers recognize (and we're all very proud of) to customers all over the world.

On top of continuing to work with our current investor Peak, from whom we’ve raised our first Seed round, we’re now thrilled to partner up with Partech as well. Partech is one of the most active tech investors in the world, bringing together capital, operational experience, and strategic support for entrepreneurs in different growth stages.

With this new funding, we’ll continue to invest in Channable as a product that supports e-commerce marketing in all ways. We’ll also scale our go-to-market teams, and continue to release new features that our customers need. Here’s a peek into what we’re working on:

Market expansion: Scaling up our teams in both North America and Europe

We are proud to be the market leader in our space in the Benelux, and we are moving quickly to become the market leader in all major European markets (DACH region, Nordics, France, Spain, Italy, and the UK).

The funding will enable our growth plans in Europe as well as the United States. This year, we have just opened our first US-based office in New York City and are establishing a full local team to drive our growth there as well.

And to support these expansion efforts, we have already tapped industry veteran Michael O’Neal to oversee our US expansion from our New York office. As VP of Business Development, Michael will lead US sales efforts. In the coming months, we will also be recruiting a number of talents to fuel international growth and product expansion.

Increasing our focus on channel and PPC integrations

We will also continue to extend our connections with local and global marketplaces and marketing channels and become the one-stop solution for e-commerce players around the world.

To help you reach an even bigger audience, we will work on AI-driven data enhancements that will help you to further improve your content and have real-time updates on product information across your sales channels, helping you solve your connectivity problems. This will augment your online capabilities and give you marketing superpowers.

Looking forward

As a people-driven company, we recognize that the real benefactors here are our customers. Customers are at the center of everything we do, and this funding will allow us to serve you better. We know that raising money is just another step along the journey, and that journey is accompanied by you—our customers, our community, our team, our partners.

Although I am really proud of what we as a team achieved over the years, I am most excited about what the future may hold for us. Over the years, we've built the best solution in the world in terms of product feed management and PPC tooling, and with that, we've grown our customer base and our team.

With the money we’ve now raised, we can step up our game even more, and launch so many exciting features that will shape up an even better Channable experience for you.

If you’re curious about our culture, our people, and what we’re creating together, come build the future of Channable alongside us. We’re always hiring across different markets, from engineering to marketing, and anything in between. We're looking forward to this new chapter and think it's going to get exciting for you too!