The Netherlands-based internet startup eFresh.com has secured €4.25 million (or roughly $5.4 million) in funding from one of the largest banks in the country, Rabobank. The company, which operates a B2B portal for the perishable industry, had previously raised an undisclosed amount of capital from private investors.
With the funding, Rabobank acquired a stake in the startup’s parent holding company, GET Holding, which was on the verge of filing for IPO recently but ultimately decided to hold off because of the economic downturn.
eFresh.com bills itself as ‘eBay for the fresh produce industry’, offering information services and a live direct trading platform for buyers and sellers of anything ranging from fruit (see example), meat, fish to flowers, eggs and dairy products. The company uses a bank-escrow service that allows traders to handle financial transactions directly with each other in real-time, and doesn’t take any commission on deals but instead makes money by charging membership fees (€899 a year) and advertising.
The company says it will use the extra capital to improve the usability of its online presence and grow on an international level following the same buy-and-build strategy we’ve seen eBay executing the past couple of years. eFresh.com has acquired 15 smaller companies and portals over the past years, and hopes to expand those operations to adequately compete against large trading portals like Alibaba and Global Sources (both strong in Asia).
Robin, thanks for posting!
‘eBay for the fresh produce industry’
Sounds like another bubble?
Don’t think we are another bubble. Perishable goods are the only things that are not yet for sale (at least not one a big scale) online. It’s a gap and we are the first to fill it. Most of the 15 companies we acquired in the past years were small portals, started by people from the industry. They see a change in their own market but don’t have the capabilities to make it a success. We hope we can, we have skills and people from the fresh produce industry and combined them with people experienced in Marketing and Internet. Resulting in eFresh.com
Very cool service. Farmer’s markets are very popular in the US, with many small producers dealing direct with consumers.
On the B2B side, I think there are significant differences between the US and Europe in this industry. Is eFresh perfecting the model in Europe first before moving to the US or are there ‘boots on the ground’ already?
How is this different from the Futures Market or forward contracts?
A startup getting $$ from a stodgy bank in this day and age? Interesting. The parent company must have some real assets as collateral.
Rabobank is one of the rarer banks. It’s not a public company but a co-operation of sorts with no shareholders but “members”. They profile themselves as the most trustworthy/stable bank and they haven’t taken any financing from the Dutch government with the advent of the credit crisis.
Any other bank would have suspended investing in start-ups for now.
Wow, something that is mentioned on Techcrunch that is not a social network or a new app for the iPhone, that appears to have a very clear business model, and the first couple of comments are negative!
I know nothing about the fresh produce market, but it seems like an interesting idea, it is easy enough to imagine it might work, and if they have attracted interest from one of the few banks in the world that is smart enough to still have any money to invest then they must be doing something right!
Good luck to them!
Hmmm, sounds like we could be bringing back the TULIP markets…
George,
The portal allows trade in non commodity fresh products without a listing on an exchange.
Jan
what auction types are supported? is it possible to bid by proxy?
WN
Fresh products are usually too complex for auctions, and therefore it is direct sale, that is why this initiative is so special. Usually a small farmer can only sell to predefined trade chains. Now he can sell to all participants in the chain, This is also possible for small farmers in Africa for example which I personally encourage.
Wondering what are the return policies on spoil eggs …
who would believe a website for fresh produce would ever amount to anything?
GroceryLocator.com – filler up!
its a very cute site with a gr8 idea … all the best to the guys.
Nice to see an example of dutch innovation and entrepeneurship, both the Rabobank and eFresh are good examples of companies that will prosper, recession or not, in my view. It’s easy to forget that there is a lot of interesting innovation besides the usual “suspects” such as apple, google, facebook etcetera
Jan,
Thanks for information. But looking at eFresh product site there are 3 options available: ask (rfq?), bid, buy now. It looks for me like a bidding system.
5.4 mil and they could not afford branding and web design specialist, design is like for 100$
Well if it’s the “ebay” for fresh produce then it should be an auction otherwise you are misleading people with that statement.
I see the traffic looks very low to your site but if most are paying members then thats fine otherwise you need to gain traction pretty quick but if you have acquired 15 other sites i cannot understand why the traffic is so low ?
I think you fail completely to understand the idea of b2b sites? They are _not_ even trying to get consumer attention, but instead work in a niche that probably includes 10,000 companies or less — and if their daily traffic would be 10,000 unique visitors, they’d be quite certain to cover most of the potential customer base.
If my business is to sell 10 billion tons of French cheese — as a one lot, not by 1 pound packages — I wouldn’t really care if 3 zillion people would visit the b2b site, but not one of them from retail chains shopping for 10 billion tons of French cheese. But if the site has 100 visitors per day and _all_ of them are shopping for my goods, it’d be a very, very wise decision to be part of that site as a seller.
@dee, thanks.
Also, remember that the portals for each vertical have a different subdomain, which might skew the numbers. A lot of the content and functionalities of the services seem to be available to registered members only. Etc.
I second the tulip comment above.
Its great to see something like this take off. I was involved in exploring almost identical idea and business plan (for more niche market segment) back in 2004 and we found very high demand for it.
Unfortunately there were issues with project business leadership and it never made it past the development lab.
I think this is a great opportunity, if done right.
I back up my claims the traffic on this site is disastrous……….
http://www.quan...main=efresh.com
http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv
This is gonna take a hell of a lot of money to get traction……….
i found some great stuff at
http://www.then...z.wordpress.com
I read everyday that various services/companies raise money from someone. Can anyone tell me what exactly is that ?
It is also worth noting that the cooperative Rabobank is very strong in the farmers sector (it has started as the ‘farmers loan bank’) and I guess they will point their customers to the site. So basically they fund a site that will help their customers make money. So even if they will not get their investment from the site, they will get more banking business from the users of the site. Win-win situation for this triple A-bank.
Not really it would have to recruit an awful lot of farmers to get even anywhere near that money back……….
eFresh is innovative. I like the business idea. It is good to see Cargill from Minnesota getting some competition. I previously underestimated the size of the commodity market until I read a market report from Cargill.
A really disruptive business model in the commodity market.
WOW! Congratulations to GET!
eFresh.com has grown 106% in memberships since the publish date op this post, providing new business opportunities to our members across the world. Starting next week we expand the business horizon of our members even further.
Stay tuned to experience this innovation!