Over the last decade, D2C has been seen as the future of brand-building and e-commerce. While some brands delivered top-line growth and reached critical mass, many struggled with profitability due to rising complexity, marketing, operations costs, and difficulties in leveraging data and software.
Though D2C is challenging and faces structural issues in the long-tail segment, it remains a fundamentally attractive space for brand building and financial success.
Closes €18M funding
Berlin-based Everstores is building a tech platform, which employs data and software to acquire and grow small D2C brands at scale. The young startup has just closed €18 million in seed funding and emerged from stealth. The financing round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital (that also invested in Ripe, CELUS, Tilt and Freeverse) and Viola Credit along with pre-seed investor Picus Capital and top-tier angels.
The round comprises €8 million in equity and €10 million debt and it plans for a more public launch. The fresh financing will allow Everstores to continue building its tech platform, provide liquidity to D2C merchants, and execute its hiring plan while bringing together top talent from tech, e-commerce, and finance.
“We’re convinced that technology and data, deep know-how in e-commerce across marketing and operations, and access to capital can solve a lot of these structural challenges faced by small merchants. Our vision is to unlock the D2C asset class at scale”, said Kristoffer Herskind, co-founder and co-CEO at Everstores.
“We realised the potential of granular, transaction-level customer data to identify nascent signs of product-market fit and to further leverage this data in combination with software to drive strong performance under our ownership. We’re optimising for data-driven, automated decision-making through a capital allocation lens”, said Carlos Lopez, co-founder and co-CEO at Everstores.
“We approached everything from first principles and with a fundamental belief that technology could drive better outcomes across the board. We’re excited about working at the frontier of this space, and we’re bringing together the smartest engineers and data scientists to crack these open-ended problems with us,” said Kirill Martynov, CTO and co-founder at Everstores.
“We believe D2C is a fundamentally attractive opportunity where structural issues in the space can be solved meaningfully through data and software. Everstores’ tech platform allows for both identification of the highest-potential brands and full value capture of this potential through their OS. We’re proud to support Everstores’ founders on their mission to unlock the D2C asset class at scale through their leading tech platform”, said Tim Rehder, Partner at Earlybird.
“No market solution currently provides European D2C entrepreneurs with a viable exit path. Everstores’ focus on brands outside of Amazon provides more levers to grow the acquired businesses, and the interplay of technology and data on their platform allows for the identification of brands with strong product market fit. We have worked with the team from day one and are excited to continue supporting them on their journey,” said Sebastian Schaefer, Investor at Picus Capital.
Operates like classic investment funds
Everstores was founded earlier this year by Kristoffer Herskind Carlos Lopez, and Kirill Martynov. Everstores has built a pricing engine that can evaluate and price D2C assets quickly and accurately by leveraging ML forecasting models. Merchants can connect their Shopify store and ads data to a portal and receive a free, data-driven analysis and valuation of their businesses within hours.
Once a brand is under Everstores’ ownership, the company replaces existing operations with their OS to automate decision-making and drive consistent, superior performance.
On the growth side, Everstores’ OS leverages large, proprietary datasets to identify highest paying customers across brands and targets them through profitable marketing channels. The OS employs data analytics to forecast demand or rationalise inventory management.
