Europe’s e-commerce will grow 30% this year to $465 billion, giving birth to a new ecosystem of services designed to serve e-commerce merchants. In the latest development, a neobank called Juni, built specifically for online retailers, officially closed for a series of $ 21.5 million just 12 weeks after it opened for business. The series, led by partners at DST Global and Felix Capital, is being attended by former Back Cherry Ventures and other early investors.
Sweden-based Juni previously raised €2 million ($2.4 million) in November, while it was still on the waiting list. One of the reasons the latest funding has been implemented so quickly is that Juni has taken three short months of his life very firmly: Juni co-founder and CEO Samir El-Sabini told TechCrunch that the startup has signed 300 businesses out of a waiting list of 3,000, presents 500% customer growth per month.
He said consumers basically sell their own products; Dropshipper sales on behalf of retailers; and performance marketers who have moved on to product sales. Another reason is that Juni is doing very well in both the investor and the customer because it identified and understood and is preparing to fix it.
El-Sabini and his two co-founders Anders Oresdal (CTO) and Jonathan Sanders (COO) all come from backgrounds working in e-commerce and fintech (in fact, one of the earlier spending startups was Pleo, who announced this week that the fund’s big Data; and the other two worked at the expense management start-up) and so they are well aware of the flaws of many banking services when it comes to running their business online. As El-Sabini describes, traditional banks have long held SMBs as customers, they have never really understood the dynamics, challenges and clarity of running an e-commerce business and this has made the company less responsive than their financial profile and needs.
“All we do is provide insights and knowledge of the e-commerce industry,” he said. “And we can have a less risky profile because we understand all the cost centers. We understand what tabula is, we know shopify.”
