Today, Inventa announced a R$ 115M Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Monashees. As we look back on their journey thus far, we thought it valuable to share why MAYA co-led Inventa’s Seed Round in February 2021. In summary, Inventa has the perfect founder-market-fit to tackle a vast and highly fragmented market of wholesale products. Here is the breakdown of what we saw about a year ago and why we are still so excited about this opportunity.
Overview: Inventa is a B2B marketplace that connects brands with independent retailers, transforming how new products are discovered and bought with flexible payment terms.
Extraordinary team: Inventa is a perfect example of founder-market-fit. The CEO, Marcos', commercial and retail expertise at Rappi allowed for the creation of a robust B2B sales machine. Meanwhile, the Leader of Ops, Tech, and Data, Fernando, has a data and analytics background that has helped map regional tendencies, optimizing assortment for clients. And finally, the CFO, Laura, has experience in credit risk and private equity, which has facilitated the structuring of a 90-day payment solution, allowing retailers to have more access to an array of products.
Huge, highly fragmented & mostly non-digitized market with working capital needs: The B2B wholesale market in Brazil is estimated at US$40B and is expected to grow by 6% every year until 2025. In addition, 98.5% of retailers are small businesses, and the number of SMBs grew by 5x over the last decade. Despite such impressive growth, the wholesale sector is still very fragmented and analog, with low e-commerce penetration (1% vs. average e-commerce penetration in the country of 10%). Because of this, Brazilian SMB retailers rely on the traditional offline wholesale market, such as Bráz, Bom Retiro, and other regional wholesale spaces in other states. These areas lack organized logistics, payment systems, and access to working capital (around 80% of SMBs don't have access to credit). Getting products into stores can make the wholesale market quite painful. Inventa has created a seamless process for local retailers to find new products for their portfolios.
Constantly growing benchmarks in similar economies as Brazil: In the past years, we saw new businesses emerging in India and the US with similar models achieving relevant success, such as Faire and Udaan. Faire, for example, connected over 200,000 retailers across North America and Europe, with 20,000 brands from +80 countries and raised US$260M at a US$7B valuation. Simultaneously, Udaan has about ~2.5M registered buyers and reaches over 1,000 cities in India, having raised at a US$3B valuation.
Why are we still bullish on Inventa?
Strong execution: in nine months of operation, Inventa has over 6k products in its catalog with more than 400 suppliers. Their database carries more than 20k stores and they have delivered 250k products to their clients.
Strong new co-investors: In addition to Andreessen Horowitz and Monashees, the new round welcomed other top investors like Greenoaks, Greylock, Tiger Global and Founders Fund, and angels such as Hans Tung and Carlos Garcia from Kavak.
This is just the beginning for Inventa and we see them ultimately serving millions of retailers and thousands of brands! We recognize a massive opportunity ahead and we are thrilled to continue our partnership!
If you're wondering what the Inventa team thinks about the partnership with MAYA, here's what the founders have to say:
"MAYA has been hands-on when needed since the beginning. They played an important role when it came to the commercial introductions that helped expand our business and key hires that shape our team today. We know this is a long ride, and we're excited to have them on board!", said Marcos Salama, CEO & Co-Founder at Inventa.
