Electronics marketplace
New financing round at Back Market
The smartphone is broken? Just get rid of it? No, most of the time it can be repaired. Photo: Mohssen Assanimoghaddam/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
From tablets to coffee machines: the start-up founded in 2014 repairs and sells high-quality electronics. Now it wants to expand.
Back Market, an online marketplace for remanufactured electronics, has closed a new round of funding. This increases the company’s valuation to 5.1 billion euros.
The French company announced on Wednesday in Paris that it had received 450 million euros from investors in order to further expand its position in Germany and throughout Europe. Leading the investment was Sprints Capital, a London-based investment firm that counts online payment service provider Revolut among its holdings in technology companies.
Open up more markets
Back Market was founded in 2014. The company repairs and sells used electronics, including Apple and Samsung smartphones and tablets, laptops, premium coffee makers, and other household electronics. However, third-party providers of refurbished devices are also active on the platform. So far, Back Market is active in 13 European countries, including Germany. Additional markets are to be opened up with the fresh money. For Germany, the start-up is planning 60 million euros for operations. In addition, the size of the German team is to be tripled.
Company co-founder Thibaud Hug de Larauze explained that the company’s aim is to make remanufactured electronics the first choice when buying technical equipment. “We expect a similar development on the electronics market as on the used car market in America.” There, the sale of used vehicles has doubled compared to the sale of new vehicles.
Black Market also wants to use the money from the financing round to improve quality control on the marketplace. The average defect rate on the platform is now four percent. That almost corresponds to the average failure rate of around three percent for new devices.