Congratulations to Leap on its $50M Series B
A few months back, we wrote about the initial progress Leap had been making coming out of the pandemic as we announced their long undisclosed Series A. Today, we’re excited to announce that Leap has raised $50m led by BAM Elevate to power the future of retail.
As we noted in our past post, Covid was not kind to the retail world. When we entered April of 2020, GMV on the Leap platform was down effectively 100%. The company was resilient, however, and finished 2020 up close to 100%. While 2021 continued to present Covid challenges, the story for Leap has been very different, growing from 13 to 47 stores and increasing in revenue by 4.3x.
Covid has accelerated digital transformation across just about every sector we invest in, and brick and mortar retail is no exception. While demand certainly remains intact, the cost and complexity of a brand running its own retail business has ballooned with Covid. Leap’s unique business model has uncovered ways to simplify the complexities and drive costs down so significantly that both the company and its customers can adequately share in the success. Perhaps even more importantly, the Leap network of brands grows stronger with every incremental brand, store and customer added to the platform. As fervent believers that our companies need to demonstrate unit economic advantages over their peers (what we call a “moat”), we’re simply floored by the impressive demonstration of in-store profitability, sales per square foot and paybacks that the Leap platform drives — to say they are industry leading would be a gross understatement. To demonstrate that type of success during the most cataclysmic event to ever hit the retail landscape, shows the resiliency and disruptiveness of the business.
With this capital, Leap transitions into an important phase of the business — from proving the nature of its model (and unit economic moats) to scaling a true platform. This capital infusion allows the team to go from dozens of locations to hundreds, fulfilling not only the incredible demand that they have from customers, but further empowering the advantages of their model to drive even better profitability to the platform and it’s customers. We feel more confident than ever that the future of retail is in front of us and are honored to be part of this young, but incredible journey.
Please join us in congratulating the Leap team on this momentous milestone and visit one of their local stores soon! Locations can be found here and you can follow the latest on their store launches on Instagram.
— Equal Ventures
PS — We’d also be remiss to not acknowledge the dedication of our co-investors, who could have easily cut bait at the first sign of market difficulties, but continued to stand by and support the company even during the hardest of times. In particular, we would like to highlight John Cowgill and the team at Costanoa Ventures. John is a rising star in venture and his level of compassion, dedication and insight make him an incredible asset to every company. John has served as an invaluable partner to us and Leap, and we consider ourselves incredibly fortunate to work with him.
