INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Back in April we saw that eporta, a London-based B2B interiors marketplace startup, had raised $8 million in a Series A funding round led by
US investor Canvas Ventures
Eport has digitized the catalogues of furnishing manufacturers and allowed businesses to order direct, cutting out the middle-men.
Now
London is continuing its obsession with interior decoration startups with the news that Clippings has raised a Series B round of funding,
Advance Venture Partners (AVP) lead the round and existing investor C4Ventures also participated.
Founded in 2014 by architecture-trained
entrepreneurs Adel Zakout and Tom Mallory, Clippings now plans to grow in the US.
Currently, the furniture industry is worth €9.6 billion
in Europe, and around $120 billion in the US, but only 6% of this spend is online.
Clippings aggregates data on over 7 million products from
over a thousand brands to simplify discovery and combines that with interactive mood boards that replace Pinterest to identify and buy a
Then it throws in collaboration tools for teams, multiple quote requests, orders, invoices and timelines into one place.
It now claims to
have about 50,000 people & including teams designing for WeWork, Citroën and British Land & using Clippings.
Adel Zakout, co-founder
and CEO of Clippings told me &We&ve built software that enables full management of an interior project, offer a layer of service and
logistics so that when you do buy, we manage it all for you vs Eporta where it fully self-serve
This doesn''t fix major pain point of customer.
He also says they have full pricing control, meaning &we can take a view of a whole project
value / customer spend and offer optimal prices vs Eporta who can''t do that as the seller controls price.
He says a typical large
co-working space project may have a budget in the £100k range and will have products from 40-50 different vendors, &so you need to be able
to consolidate pricing, service, logistics and offer tech to manage it all.
Other players in the industry (but not competitors) include
