Veeqo helps online retailers all over the world grow their business by selling on multiple channels.
Business overview
| Location | Swansea United Kingdom |
|---|---|
| Social media | |
| Website | www.veeqo.com |
| Sectors | SaaS/PaaS Digital B2B |
| Company number | 8391581 |
| Incorporation date | 6 Feb 2013 |
Idea
Introduction
Veeqo is powering the biggest shift in retail history. Our software is designed to help online retailers all over the world grow their business by selling on multiple channels.
Veeqo is the Master Product Catalog for online retailers. Through Veeqo, they manage their inventory, orders and shipping across multiple channels and countries in one single platform.
Ecommerce is undoubtedly the future of retail. In fact, figures on Black Friday sales performance in 2015 revealed that online customers overtook in-store for the first time ever.
But being a successful ecommerce retailer is hard. Customers want to be able to purchase your products on any platform they want, on any device they want, from anywhere in the world.
Intended impact
Veeqo currently powers more than £8m worth of sales per month*, and is built on three core pillars - Orders, Inventory and Shipping.
Orders lets retailers view and manage every sale they receive from across all their stores, completely in real time, within a single dashboard.
Inventory syncs all your stock across all your stores, making sure everything is always completely 100% up-to-date.
And for Shipping, Veeqo integrates with the major shipping couriers in the world, allowing you to ship up to 100 orders in a single click. This is a massive time-saver, and something our customers absolutely love.
Veeqo allows retailers to gain invaluable insights into their sales performance, and influences how they run their business in a way that simply wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
The system allows retailers to manage cost of inventory very carefully, thus allowing business to see their true margin by product/group and, most usefully, by sales channel.
*Unaudited management accounts.
Substantial accomplishments to date
-> 2013: Out of frustration of not finding the right software to help him grow his ecommerce business, Matt Warren starts the Veeqo adventure.
-> December 2014: Veeqo starts a Seedrs campaign with the intention of raising £250k, raising an actual total of £670k.
-> February 2016: Veeqo acquires logistics firm ParcelBright to expand it’s portfolio of product and increase its revenue stream.
-> May 2016: JC joins Veeqo and bring his expertise of scaling a global SaaS company from 0 to 200 employees in 5 years and creating a global leader worth over £150M (Vend HQ).
-> June-October 2016: Veeqo doubles it’s Monthly Recurring Revenue over a 4-month period, with no additional headcount or resource.*
-> November 2016: Veeqo processed over 30,000 orders on Black Friday 2016 alone for a value of £1.3m.*
*Unaudited management accounts.
Monetisation strategy
Veeqo has a track record of strong financial growth, and is already backed by significant, high profile investors from the worlds of retail and tech. We have more than doubled our monthly recurring revenue over the past 4 months - and this is just the beginning.*
Veeqo has continued to see meaningful success since the earliest seed round in 2013 at a valuation of £270K and the last public equity round was at a £1.75m valuation in 2015. During our last public equity round we were oversubscribed by a factor of 271%.
We have two sources of revenue:
- Veeqo Platform: 70% of our revenue comes from customers paying for our software. They will pay on average between £1,500 and £10,000 per year. They pay every month or every year.
- Veeqo Shipping: 30% of our revenue comes from shipping rates. Through the ParcelBright acquisition, we have developed a new revenue stream. We enable our customers to access better shipping costs because of our bulk buying price.
Our SaaS business is clearly our focus. The parcel broking business unit provides a nice additional source of revenue with minimal cost of acquisition.
*Unaudited management accounts.
Use of proceeds
With this new investment we will invest into 3 main areas:
-> Product Development: We want to enable our customers to be more successful when they are using Veeqo. We want to give them access to more marketplaces to sell to and provide them with insights on their most profitable channels.
-> UK Domination: Veeqo already has a very strong footprint on the UK market and we want to strengthen this position by investing into sales and marketing.
-> US Expansion: 18% of our new revenue over the past 3 months has come from the US market. Our Executive team has successfully expanded into North America for other SaaS businesses, and we are now ready to go and set up a team on the ground there.
Please note that Veeqo has an outstanding convertible loan of £253,500 which will convert on this round at a 20% discount to the valuation of this round.
Market
Target market
Veeqo targets online retailers in the UK, US, New Zealand, Australia and Germany selling on multiple platforms with a turnover between £0.5m and £50m.
Characteristics of target market
The size of the potential addressable market is already huge but it is also growing really fast because it is supported by two main trends:
- Rise of Marketplaces (Amazon, eBay …). At the close of 2015, it was estimated that Amazon would have 26% of all U.S. web sales and it is predicted that Global marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay and Alibaba will own almost 40% of the global online retail market within five years.More importantly 49% of Amazon sales come from Third Party Sellers. These merchants need an inventory system to run their business and Veeqo is placed to be a prime choice for the top 1% of Amazon and eBay sellers.
- Rise of Online: More people shopped online than in stores for the first time ever on Black Friday in 2015, marking an inflection point for the retailing medium. Retail e-commerce sales worldwide are predicted to grow from $1,548B in 2015 to $4,058B in 2020, so an average of just over 20% per year.
We consider that the immediate Total Addressable Market for Veeqo is around 50,000 Companies and as consequence we can aim for £500-700M turnover Total Addressable Market. We believe that this market potential will triple in size thanks to the 2 trends mentioned above.
You can find more details by requesting the document called market sizing.
Marketing strategy
The founding team brings two essential expertise to scale successfully a business like Veeqo. Matt has built and exited successful a multi-million ecommerce business (Jura Watches) so he knows the problems of this market and has a large network in the online retail industry.
As Chief Revenue Officer for Vend HQ, Jean-Christophe Taunay-Bucalo helped them scale from 40 customers to 15,000, with a £200m+ valuation. Vend HQ is now one of the global leaders in POS with offices in 6 countries.
So far, Veeqo has been relying on word of mouth, digital marketing, and a great thought leadership strategy. Veeqo regularly organises webinars and publishes ebooks in partnership with some of the best retail publications and experts in the market.
Moving forward, Veeqo will focus on the following marketing strategy:
- Developing a Partnership Channel with web agencies: They are often the first point of contact for retailers when they develop their online presence, so they are a natural go-to-market relay for Veeqo. We already have a strong partnership in place.
- Expanding to the US: Veeqo is already seeing great traction from the US market (18% of new customers for the last three months) and has internal expertise on how to expand successfully to the US.
- Increasing thought leadership events: Veeqo is deeply committed to providing the best content to help its customers grow their businesses. These events are a great way to build the Veeqo brand as a thought leader in the market and acquire leads.
- Outbound Sales: We have successfully tested outbound sales and we plan to ramp it up.
More details available in the forecast and pitch deck.
Competition strategy
Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, we intend to focus on one specific market, and we work with the best partners to help us solve the retailer’s problems.
Veeqo is the Master Product Catalog for online retailers. Through Veeqo, they manage their inventory, orders and shipping across multiple channel and multiple countries. We integrate with the leaders to bring the ultimate solution in 1 place:
-> Ecommerce Engine: Magento, WooCommerce, and Shopify are market-leading ecommerce platforms, and Veeqo syncs up with all of these in real time. This allows retailers to effortlessly pull their products and orders from these platforms.
-> Marketplaces: Amazon and eBay offer great opportunities for our retailers. Veeqo integrates with them and enables retailers to list seamlessly on these marketplaces using machine learning.
-> Accounting Platform. Xero and Quickbooks are great platforms for SMB, so we enable our retailers to seamlessly publish their accounts to these accounting platforms.
-> Shipping: Veeqo has 9 shipping integrations. This flexibility enables our retailers to save time and money by choosing the right shipping provider depending on the type of products they are shipping.
Our competition has been focused on solving this problem for the very small online retailer (<£0.5M) per year or for the very large one (>£100M). For the Small and Medium sized online retail market of £0.5-50M per year, there is no fully integrated solution available to our knowledge which offers the level of flexibility and depth of features that Veeqo offers.
There is an inherent barrier to entry on this market: it requires a highly complex platform with 20 different ecommerce integrations. So we are sure that any new player in our market will find it difficult to deliver a solution as good as Veeqo.