Sifted - The rise and fall of Amazon aggregators

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Amazon aggregator SellerX was once a darling of Berlin’s startup scene, with a unicorn valuation and nearly $900m raised in debt and equity — but the company has come crashing back to earth. It's now set to be auctioned off later this month — a decision driven by its debt investors BlackRock and Victory Park Capital. 

Aggregator startups were among the poster children of the pandemic tech boom, with investors tripping over themselves to get onto their cap tables; on September 1 2021, $1bn was piled into the industry in a single day. 

Former employees describe the boom times as a heady era of fast-paced deal making, where these companies sought to buy up the best Amazon sellers before a competitor swooped in.

“We had 10-15 live transactions at once, I was working on five deals at a time. We had an entire team from Credit Suisse and Goldman,” a former SellerX employee recounted to Sifted. “If we were slow on due diligence for a deal, Razor [a competitor] would show up and hook it.”

By 2022, the picture looked very different. A drop in consumer spending power, alongside a downtick in ecommerce activity, affected the aggregators’ abilities to draw profit from some of the sellers they’d acquired. 

Senior reporters Freya Pratty and Miriam Partington spoke to former SellerX employees to hear more about the company’s twists and turns. 

Elsewhere today:

• Innovate UK reverses female founder funding decision following uproar from UK startup community
• Bring tech IPOs back home, European stock exchanges and startups ask politicians
• Doccla raises £35m Series B to scale its virtual ward in France and DACH

— Tim Smith, news editor

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↩️ Innovate UK, Britain’s innovation agency, has reversed a decision to award just half the number of grants it had promised to female founders in a funding competition. 

• 25 out of a potential 50 grants were originally awarded for the Women in Innovation competition, it was announced last week, despite receiving 1,452 applications. Each grant is worth up to £75,000. 
• Hundreds of female founders took to social media over the weekend to question the assessment process — and the organisation’s commitment to supporting women. They also called on Innovate UK to award the full 50 grants and explain where the rest of the funding has gone. 
• On Monday afternoon, Innovate UK announced on LinkedIn that it will now award the full 50 grants, representing a total investment of £4m, “as originally committed”.

📈 Some of Europe’s leading stock exchanges are calling on European policy makers to strengthen the continent’s IPO market. In an open letter sent to European policymakers, exchanges including Germany’s Deutsche Börse and the pan-European Euronext have called for strengthening the EU’s capital market union and introducing policy measures that would make public listing and investing in Europe less burdensome. 

• The problem is real: many European scaleups, like Klarna, Bolt and Vinted, are likely to choose to go public in the US. The letter suggests that in 2021 alone, there were more tech IPOs in the US than in Europe over the entire period from 2015 to 2023; it also says that 50 European-founded companies have filed for an IPO in the US since 2018. 

🩺 UK-based virtual ward healthtech Doccla has raised a £35m Series B led by European VC Lakestar. The startup, which offers hospitals technology to monitor patients at home, has quadrupled its revenue in 2023, compared to the year before, and is onboarding 1,000 new patients every month. 

• Doccla is the largest provider of virtual wards and remote monitoring of patients for the NHS in the UK. It’s now planning to expand to France and Germany with the help of its new strategic local investors Elaia and Bertelsmann Investments.

🛍️ Inside SellerX: valued at $1bn by investors; now up for auction

Munich-based Lendorse, which provides international students with funding and career support, raised €10m in debt funding from i2Group.

London-based Signol, a software service for emissions-heavy industries, raised €2.9m in funding. TMV led the round and was joined by investors including Ultranav, MOL PLUS and East Innovate.

Worksop, UK-based Warehow, enables fashion and small home goods retailers to sell on multiple marketplaces through one fulfilment service, raised €2.5m in Series A funding. Mercia Ventures led the round and was joined by MENA Moonshots.

Milan-based IdentifAi, which checks the authenticity of AI created media content, raised €2.2m in seed funding. United Ventures led the round.

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