Copenhagen-based fashiontech startup Traede, which offers a B2B ecommerce platform, has closed an additional $1.8 million investment led by PreSeed Ventures, a leading European VC that previously backed companies like Vivino and Trustpilot. Fashion and lifestyle industry heavyweights Henrik Theilbjørn, Chairman of Swedish fashion giant Boozt.com and Simon Stampe, Chairman and founder of Danish interior design firm Bloomingville, also participated. This additional funding extends Traede’s seed round to $2.4 million in total.
Traede is a B2B ecommerce platform designed to simplify and digitise the selling process for wholesalers in fashion. Wholesalers are able to manage all aspects of the B2B sales process with a single platform, including order management, CRM, invoicing and managing product listings. Wholesalers can also easily set up B2B-only webshops, giving their retailers the same shopping experience that they get from the B2C world. By fully digitising their sales operations, wholesales can take orders 24/7 and cut costs and errors linked to processing orders manually through the phone, email and dealing with multiple systems.
“The B2C ecommerce landscape is extremely advanced and innovative. Companies like Shopify offer an amazing service to their customers, have high performing and incredibly sophisticated B2C ecommerce platforms. Why should B2B be any different? says Christopher Heilmann, Traede’s CEO and Founder, and continues with explaining how Traede are positioning themselves as to go-to software for both big and small fashion and lifestyle brands.
“Big fashion and lifestyle brands have used software to optimize their B2B sales operations like this for years, but even these systems are complicated to set up and expensive to run. It also means small or medium sized companies are missing out. We’re changing that”.
Traede has been growing steadily since its pre-seed round, also led by PreSeed Ventures less than a year ago, with revenues increasing by 250% and customers by 141% last year, and headcount doubling to 15 employees. This latest round will enable Traede to gain market share across Northern Europe, and further develop its product.
“From my position as co-owner and chairman of the board, I’ve seen first hand how ambitious and hungry every member of the team is. They’ve managed to make a product with serious international potential and I’ve really enjoyed working with them. Now it’s about turning that potential into a very good business.” said Henrik Theilbjørn, the Chairman of Boozt.com who will also be joining the board.
In the coming months, Traede will be introducing several new features to help wholesalers make smarter business decisions, by investing in machine learning to offer intelligent forecasting functions and rolling out an analytics suite.