We don’t often write about Latin-American startups (in fact, if you’re familiar with that market, send us more tips please), but here’s an interesting one. Argentina-based Geelbe, a private e-commerce website, has just raised a second round of funding worth $1 million, led by D’Épée Investments.
The company is actively looking to expand its VIP shopping operations to other Latin-American countries, starting with Mexico first and Brazil later this year. The company had earlier raised $300,000 from a group of angel investors.
The model is simple but extremely powerful, as European startups like Vente-Privee, PrivateOutlet and BuyVip have already proven.
The basic principle is to fulfil supplier’s needs to quickly sell excess stock via the internet, without harming the brand’s image or diverting revenue from other distribution channels. To do this, services like Geelbe try to attract an select community of buyers on an invite-only basis, and help brands sell that extra stock to their members at reduced prices (with discounts amounting up to 70%), only for a limited period of time and without any of the disadvantages cited above.
Geelbe is considered to be the first significant web-based outlet of this kind in Latin-America, so it has the first-mover advantage and the momentum sorely needed to make inroads in that market. If they do this the smart way and succeed in expanding into other countries quickly and without burning too much cash, it has a lot going for it, especially if it sticks around long enough for the economy to start picking up again.
(Source: Denken Ãœber)
Here in Buenos Aires there is a large network of entrepreneurs and startups named Palermo Valley after Sillicon Valley (www.palermovalley.com) Plenty of talent here, and great opportunities for investors (such as Aumio at http://www.aumio.com.) Regards.
I’m not too excited about the name. How do you pronounce that and are people going to be able to remember it?
How can anyone could remember ‘google’ back in 1998?
a lot of smoke.. a-lot
a loooooooootttttt, belive me
Glit.com does this for clothing here in US. I’ve been invited to it and I enjoy getting a e-mail each day announcing a sale from a new clothing designer. It provides a reason to revist the site each day. With normal e-commerce stores I’ll check it out once in a while and scour and digest their entire product catalog. If I don’t want anything there is little reason to go back. With this, private invite, limited stock model its fun to check each day to see if anything I like has come in.
Hey guys!
I’m from Buenos Aires, Argentina and I’m very happy with this kind of news.
Even if we have a large Group of IT Entrepreneurs in our country (I have my own company as well), it’s not that common to see people receiving funding.
We are far away and really behind in terms of angel money, venture capitals and private investors.
While in other countries, such as France or USA, you see twice a day news talking about new projects being invested, in our country you hear this few times a year.
And besides this, people having money to invest, feel much more comfortable investing in assets such as real state or soy.
So, for me, it’s really awesome to read this kind of news or the one we’d read few month ago talking about Three Melons (www.threemelons.com)
Being on the spotlight will help more start-ups and entrepreneurs to receive investments as well.
So, Congratulations to the Geelbe Team and good luck in this new venture!!!
=)
Sally B.
Wormhole IT (www.wormholeit.com)
Geelbe sounds like “she-e-L-be”, “yelbe” or so
Thank all for your great comments.
We are very happy to start this new phase on Geelbe’s life!
It seems that there are quite a few errors in this article:
“Geelbe is considered to be the first significant web-based outlet of this kind in Latin-America, so it has the first-mover advantage and the momentum sorely needed to make inroads in that market”
=> did you paste and copy their press release?
A few different websites have been launched in Brazil and Latin America, some over a year ago, for example http://www.coquelux.com, http://www.brandsclub.com, http://www.privalia.com...
Brazil is by far the largest market in Latin America (whether looking at overall GDP, online retail, online advertsing…).
So when a start-up from Argentina, that only operates there, claims to be the first or biggest of Latin America… please take this with a grain of salt. And don’t believe the Hype.
In Brazil, http://www.coquelux.com.br seems to be gaining traction, and both http://www.privalia.com.br and http://www.brandsclub.com.br are investing in media buying and trying to grow agressively.
Techcrunch, I guess you could research and double check your articles better, especially when you do not know a market well enough.
Thanks.
Cheers!
Julien
Julien,
Brazil speaks portuguese and the rest of latinamerica speaks Spanish.
The sites you’re mentioning are in Portuguese and Geelbe is in Spanish: Or do you read websites in Chinese when you get bored of reading Techcrunch?
Besides, none of these companies you mention paid Arrington for publicity ; ) and money is what makes the world go round.
I also checked all the websites you mentioned on alexa and their not doing different than Geelbe, so following the old saying: “Chupate esta mandarina, gilun!”
Lula
quere’ que te boletiemo?!
Vos y tu flia son todo’ NN en 24hs!
Corre Shulien! Salvate si pode’!!
Lui’ D’Elia
I don’t believe Argentinians have any more credit to buy expensive stuff. They already got indebted up to the top and then stopped paying. So why bother with buying clubs?
Rita where do you live? The US has debts of almost 100% of GDP, the financial system is collapsed and your main industry is bankrupt… latam seems a safe haven compared to the US.
Great job guys, even more valuable in these times. Keep going at it. grosos!
Manu, from wiki: “Governor Néstor Kirchner … during Kirchner’s presidency Argentina restructured its defaulted debt with a steep discount (about 66%) on most bonds”. When you pay only 1/3 of your debt is easy to “reduce your debt”. You can just take the calculator and divide by 3. Argentina’s debt was equivalent to 150 percent of its GDP when it defaulted in 2001. The sad thing is that with all the public subsidy he is doing, debt is creeping up again at a fast pace.
Have you ever heard of the US defaulting or unilaterally reducing payments? Could happen in the future, but Argentina already has advantage on that, it has a long tradition in doing it. I just wanted to back my comments with facts.
la deuda con el FMI que tiene la Argentina, es una deuda que NO deberia pagarse JAMAS! YA QUE EL Estado asumio la deuda de las empresas privadas…
El Estado argentino paga a los acreedores privados de estas empresas: Renault France, Mercedez Benz, City Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, Bank of America, First Nacional Bnak of Boston, Crédit Lyonnais, Deustsche Bank, Société Générale.
Rita,
Fortunately, despite what politicians did (and do), Argentina is a prosperous country with big retail and consumer market.
We are having great answer from Argentina’s consumers, and we know we will have the same result in our new Mexico operations.
This is a great concept and seems to be helpful to buyers and sellers. Globalauctionlink.com provides a very similar service primarily in the US. The company works with large suppliers and medium sized companies. I sure like the concepts of moving distressed inventory without interrupting distribution channels.
Argentina, hmmm… I had the pleasure of meeting an argentine attorney who’s running a classified ads site in Spanish but only for US spanish speakers, something which I though was an absolutely brilliant idea. Now after reading about Geelbe, I think I need to visit Buenos Aires for more inspiration.
Does someone actually know the name of that Spanish classifieds website I am talking about? I wrote down the name of the website on paper but can’t find it
Smiles,
Brenda
Brenda, You may be thinking of OLX http://www.olx.com/es/ founded by a couple of successful entrepreneurs one of whom is Alec Oxenford an Argentine (and a great guy).
I also suggest checking out sonico, LatAm’s homegrown answer to facebook. They have a clever (and fun) team of entrepreneurs who just launched some new features yesterday.
The Latin American tech scene is growingly steadily and by all reports will fare the down turn in online advertising much better than other markets. There are some truly creative entrepreneurs throughout Latin America and it’s not such a bad place to visit for no reason at all!
Thanks Angel Gambino, but surfing the internet I found it: http://www.clasilistados.org
I checked olx and the concept is essentially the same but I still like clasilistados more as I’m comfortable using craigslist -however, I still need to improve my Spanish to use clasilitados- . Now, I am quite impressed with all the argentine entrepreneurs Argentina offers internet-wise.
warm rgds,
Brenda
Congratulations and go ahead !
Great news, Geelbe.com is a customer of ours, congratulations!
I’ve also just submitted info on our company, Common Sense LLC. We are a custom application development services and email marketing company based in San Antonio and Buenos Aires, Argentina. We service clients across the US, Europe and Latin America.
Thanks, have a great day!
dear folks, this article about Geelbe is far from reality, as Argentinean markets are less than 1/4 of Brazilian markets, where on line private clubs have already arrived, bigger than Geelbe further south. here you have some names of the leaders in Brazil : http://www.coquelux.com.br http://www.privalia.com.br http://www.brandsclub.com.br
if you want more updated info, feel free to ping me.
rgds
I have been researching the market of private sales for a client and completely agree with Roberto. Brazilian market is more than 4 times the Argentine and if you compare the current economical situation…
To give you an idea of fundings just in Brasil Brands Club got US$10 million and Privalia mentioned investing EURO 3MM so good luck to Geelbe to go to Brasil and being the 5th or 6th player.
In Mexico I believe it’s the 3rd to Market after hipxik and artisumo.
There is also a new website called
http://www.mercatrade.com
It’s the B2B Trade Portal for doing buisness in Latin America and the Caribbean