Behind the Term Sheet: Looking Back on Reebelo’s $50M Series A and the Emergence of a Global Recommerce Player
Just over a year ago, we shared our investment in Reebelo — APAC’s largest marketplace for refurbished electronic devices, co-leading its $20M Series A. Last week, Reebelo extended the round with an additional $29M, bringing the Series A total to $50M while announcing its official launch in the United States.
From the initial investment via our early-stage C.Entrepreneur Fund to re-upping through Innovation Fund III (our latest $1B investment vehicle), it’s made quite clear that we are still hugely excited about this startup out of Southeast Asia supporting the $339B global circular economy.
When doubling (or more) down on an investment in a company, it’s always heartening to do a ‘look back’ to re-compute what got you excited in the first place, what you got right (or wrong) and where your conviction stands today. Below, we’ll revisit our original investment thesis and summarize what’s changed in the past 15 months that’s gotten us to today’s landmark news — taking Reebelo from an APAC leader to a global recommerce player.
The Market
Then: In our previous thesis we predicted the addressable market for Reebelo to be roughly $25B.
We were SO wrong.
Now: The company has expanded its geographical reach beyond APAC (more on this later!) and coupled it with the world entering a recession — which served as a catalyst for used goods in general. A counter cyclical theme for us, which seems to have paid off. As a result, their addressable market now stands at ~$60B and forecasted to get to $75B in the next 24 months. Expect a deepening recession and wave of conscious consumption to further fuel the Reebelo growth story.
Traction
Then: We knew Reebelo was growing fast. After all, it grew over 5X YoY at the time of our investment and was already available in six countries across APAC (largest being Australia).
Now: In 2022, the company added nearly $100M in annualized GMV by utilizing just $6.5M in cash. This represents a nearly 4X growth for the year — well surpassing their forecast. What was more impressive was the revenue per employee grew by 50% and they added a number of new countries to their map, including, the United States.
In June of 2022, the team mentioned they wanted to enter the US and would launch in September. In September, they launched, and 4 months later, ~25% of their revenue came from the US alone.
Layers to the Platform
Then: When we last invested in Reebelo, it still had a high single digit take rate and largely sold just one type of product on its platform — used consumer electronics.
Now: Today it has added over 50% to that take rate, hitting double digits, on the back of some critical product and fintech layers to their platform.
Fintech & Insurtech
In 2022, the company invested in developing an insurtech and fintech set of products which has seen massive adoption. About 50% of all consumer products sold on the platform have a high margin fintech and / or insurtech product attached to it — which in turn contributes directly to the high take rates, high gross margins and burn efficiency. In the future these products will not only serve as hooks for engagement but will also help generate near-field cross-selling opportunities.
Beyond Consumer Electronics
Today, there is deep coverage across consumer electronics, but the team has already begun experimenting with a variety of categories with relative success. We have already seen some categories — specifically in refurbished sports goods take off on the platform leading us to believe there are several other categories which are awaiting to be unlocked on the platform.
Parting Thoughts
The Cathay Innovation team in Southeast Asia has been running an investment theme which has seen extensive success in the past 24 months — investing in great founders and companies who can build and prototype a product here, but scale it anywhere and everywhere.
If you zoom out on Reebelo, this company shouldn’t exist. Two founders from Austria and France respectively, should not be able to build a global consumer marketplace from Singapore with significant traction in Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea, and most recently, the US. It shouldn’t exist and yet it does.
As for what comes next, we’re super excited that Reebelo is moving its management and HQ to Silicon Valley to further build on its amazing US head start and turn it into broader North American dominance. We’re equally excited about this being one of the few consumer companies that truly values building efficiently and knows the nuance between growth and scale.
In our look back (then to now) we realized that all the large ESG pieces remain intact, but even we — if we’re being honest — were not able to properly compute the sheer operational prowess and execution chops of this team. While it’s still very early days, there’s a lot to be excited for in the Reebelo journey.
