Online wine store and community site Vinfolio has raised $4.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Panorama Capital after receiving an undisclosed amount of angel investment earlier. San Francisco-based Vinfolio offers a set of integrated services and resources to basically help wine enthusiasts and collectors buy, sell, manage and enjoy wine.
Vinfolio CEO Stephen J. Bachmann said the investment will mostly be used to accelerate the growth of its Vinfolio Marketplace, an online platform for buying and selling wine that currently boasts over 250,000 wines up for bidding, and the startup’s expansion in Asia.
There’s no shortage of wine-related websites and services out there. From the top of my head: review sites Snooth and Corkd, Vinogusto, good old Wine.com and wine ‘discovery’ service Adegga, although I’m sure there are many more.
Curious to see if Vinfolio will manage to gain mind and market share in this corked crowded space.
Cheers!
sex and booze always sells!!!!
Congratulations to Steve and his crew – a great result for a team that works really hard and builds great stuff. One of the best wine stores around.
I wonder how @garyvee is going to react to this…
Happily I like those guys!
Congratulations to the team at Vinfolio for the great Marketplace. A great example of an online wine shop that continues to innovate in the area.
Nicolas,
Is there more to this story? Not sure why @garyvee would really care- 4.5 mil is a drop in the bucket and will not change the landscape of a winemarket at all-In fact, I would imagine Gary Vaynerchuk would be thrilled by this news as the more exposure people get to wine, the more will eventually find their way to Winelibrary.com who by far has the best prices in the country. Also Vinifolio is partners on a sales platform on CellarTracker.com which also links to GaryV tasting notes.
Anyway just my 2 cents
Wine Library is a $50 million dollar business. I don’t know the breakdown of sales locally to nationwide shipping, but $4.5 million will have no impact on them. I agree with Kahuna that it will probably benefit them if more people get used to buying wine online. The WL has a great selection and great pricing.
lol! It’s too expensive to buy them
Congrats to Steve and the terrific crew. It has been great partnering with them on the Marketplace.
-Eric LeVine
CellarTracker.com
Actually my blog post at The Wine Collector disclosed the prior investment amount. It was $9.5mm from a combination of myself and 2 rounds of investment with individuals (many of whom are venture capitalists investing as individuals).
Very nice. A big congrats to Vinfolio!
Mark
MustLoveWine.com
Congrats to Vinfolio. It’s not easy to crack the online wine sales business.
Btw. I’m not sure why we never make the “wine-related website” list. If you haven’t heard of us, LocalWineEvents.com is the largest online resource to find wine events by city across the globe.
/james
LocalWineEvents.com
A great achievement for Vinfolio. I look forward to seeing the what the future holds this great company.
Congrats to VinFolio. They have a great product, and I’m sure they’ll put this cash to good use expanding their market share.
i have nothing worthwile to contribute to this conversation because i didn’t know about vinfolio…seen it mentioned one other time on this wbesite. the webdesign is alright, but i’ve passed this story twice and refrained from commenting, but i can’t do it anymore. that logo needs to change. i used that same grape graphic when i was working on a brand and those half circle shapes are redundent if they mean grape or supposed to be circular…are they supposed to mean family sharing…anyways bottom line is that logo needs to change. i could make it and if it looks like something i could pull from my a$$ then i know it’s not a good thing for a company. whoever made it needs to reconsider the design.
Congrats VF!!!
Time to pop the champagne
Wow. 30-60K users (quantcast) = $4.5 mil for just part of the company?
good article.
Twitter connect it is broken. Harringtoooooon!
Congrats to Steve! It will be interesting to see how they decide to compete with the already well-established competition. I would think that the wine-ratings sites could create a wine marketplaces themselves.
That’s a huge value to the consumer. Amazon.com succeeded partially because of low prices and reliable shipping. But a huge advantage was that its helpful reviews really added to the user experience.
Buying wine blindly is usually a bad idea, as there is a lot of bad stuff out there (no offense to anyone!). Therefore customer reviews are going to be much more important for this type of product than books.