Webel, a Madrid-based marketplace that enables users to search and book almost any service in the comfort of their homes, has raised €550K in a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) led by Trind Ventures (which backed Xceed, My Telescope and Jobilla).
The capital has also been backed by Tiburon, a superangel fund from Daniel Wild and Felix Artmann, and other well-known business angels like Hugo Arévalo, founder of ThePowerMBA and investor in the 5 Spanish’s current/future unicorns like Glovo or Playtomic.
Brings any service to doorstep
Founded by Nacho, Carlos, Guillermo & Javier, Webel has developed an app where clients can book their services in just 5 clicks.
However, Webel is not the first platform to do so. Previously, numerous startups had tried this model but struggled in a couple of aspects — profit & scalability, mainly due to low client repetition caused by platform leakage.
Nacho Tejero, CEO of Webel says “If you want people to repeat their order through your platform (hence paying a commission), the value created for both parties for doing so has to be greater than the economic value (take rate) you are taking from the transaction. If not, people will go off-platform.”
Consequently, Webel built a SaaS tool (e.g., Calendar, notifications, automated invoice) to manage their services and an algorithm that would compare the professional’s repetition with its peers and reward the most loyal suppliers with higher visibility and a lower commission.
Webel claims, on average, each customer books 8 services a year, which resulted in +75% of their GMV coming from repeat customers.
The company also shares that it has witnessed a 23% monthly growth for 13 consecutive months.
Nacho says, “now it’s time to bring Webel to millions of people’s hands, one by one. We have proved our model to be profitable & scalable, and with the funds raised, we want to achieve a larger scale. We will be soon expanding into new markets like Italy or Portugal.” They started in Madrid, but have already expanded into Barcelona, which already represents 15% of their total GMV thanks to a 55% MoM growth for the past 4 months, and their goal is “to become the global market leader. We are going to create the biggest company in our sector”.
“We believe in Webel’s data-driven team. They have great energy and are focusing on the right problems of scaling the services marketplace. It’s indeed an incredibly challenging sector, but Webel seems to have solved it and therefore created a huge opportunity with it” – Peeter Kompus, Investment Manager at Trind Ventures.
