The Amazon roll-up play — where one company creates economies of scale by buying up and consolidating multiple smaller third-party merchants that sell their goods via Amazon’s marketplace — continues to be a strong e-commerce trend, and in the latest development, one of the hopefuls in this space is announcing a major injection of capital to fuel its own place in the field.
Elevate Brands, a New York- and Austin-based startup that acquires and runs third-party Amazon merchants, has picked up $250 million in funding, money that it will be using both to continue investing in its technology, as well as to buy up more small businesses.
Elevate is already profitable, with 25 brands currently in its stable, many of which also have come to Elevate with patents for their products, CEO and founder Ryan Gnesin told TechCrunch. The plan will be to continue to enhance the systems it has in place for evaluating potential M&A and analyzing the landscape overall — today its algorithms use some 100 million data points, it says, to find suitable acquisition targets — and to continue building out other organizational efficiencies.
“We started selling at the end of 2016, testing the waters by selling a few private label products,” Ryan Gnesin, the CEO and founder of Elevated, told TechCrunch in an interview. That gave the company an early look at how to handle supply chains in manufacturing, and to think about how to differentiate its products from similar ones that are sold alongside them on Amazon. By 2017, Elevate was managing some 8,000 SKUs under that model.
Read the full article: Elevate Brands banks $250M to roll up third-party merchants selling on Amazon’s marketplace
