Luxembourg’s MarketLeap, formerly Gonuggets, has secured an additional €1.5 million in seed funding, taking its total funding to €2.6 million. The latest round sees Notion Capital, Kima Ventures, and Motier Ventures, among others, joining existing investors, including Luxembourg’s Expon Capital. The funding will be used to accelerate the operating system’s technical development, including the addition of new service offerings, and to facilitate expansion into the US while scaling UK operations.
Online marketplaces continue to experience rapid growth, offering retailers significant opportunities for business expansion, with the top 100 marketplaces selling $3.25 trillion in goods in 2022. Reports estimate that third-party online marketplaces will become the largest and fastest-growing retail channel globally, accounting for 59% of global e-commerce sales transactions by 2027.
MarketLeap was founded as Gonuggets in 2022 by Mamoun Benkirane and Mekki Mouaddeb, former employees of e-commerce giants Amazon and Jumia. The pair also developed a successful e-commerce fashion marketplace that was sold to a network company of the world’s largest fashion retailer. Now, the rebranded MarketLeap aims to democratize e-commerce, allowing brands to unlock their potential reach and revenues and immediately launch across new marketplaces worldwide, breaking e-commerce boundaries in the same transformative way that Amazon did in the retail landscape.
“Currently, most brands reach only 0.2% of their total marketplace potential due to a lack of expertise, time, and money. They end up spending over 70% of their time managing their marketplace operations, accounting for less than 20% of their total revenue,” explains Mamoun Benkirane, CEO and co-founder of MarketLeap. “MarketLeap helps brands break through their revenue ceilings on e-commerce marketplaces. We make marketplaces the easiest sales channel for brands, with no time, effort, or capital required, allowing them to focus on what they are the most passionate about, building and sourcing their products.”
MarketLeap’s clients have achieved an average of 4x revenue growth within the first month of operations, facilitated by the platform’s ability to actively identify the strongest growth opportunities and implement strategic actions to drive brand development. The company currently helps brands sell on marketplaces across more than 30 countries and is continually expanding into new channels and locations. The diverse range of customers includes Danish watchmaker Nordgreen, Swedish audio product manufacturer Defunc, British collagen producer Edible Health, and Germany’s Guggenheimer Coffee, which experienced a tenfold increase in sales revenue within just six months, making their products best-sellers in their target markets.
“Partnering with MarketLeap is a significant milestone for us at Edible Health. It opens up tremendous opportunities for us to reach a wider audience and make a greater impact,” says Jessika Nilsson, COO at Edible Health. “We really appreciate MarketLeap’s tech-first approach to e-commerce, and the result has helped us offer our products to global audiences with almost no extra effort.”
“The e-commerce landscape is evolving rapidly, and online marketplaces are becoming the established backbone for many of the largest online retailers. The skilled and experienced founding team immediately made MarketLeap’s potential and differentiation clear in this noisy field. MarketLeap is pioneering the way brands expand globally, compete effectively, and access hidden demand. We are honored to back them and support their continued journey ahead,” says Owen Reynolds, Venture Partner at Expon Capital.
Finding the right product-market fit in new markets can be very challenging for brands. Furthermore, brands often struggle when investing in new markets, and may be hesitant to do so because it’s difficult to predict the potential results. With its unique platform developed in-house, MarketLeap aims to offer its clients improved capital efficiency and the ability to reach new markets more efficiently than before, with significantly less risk and greater predictability.
“Our platform is integrated with several partners, including 3PLs and finance service providers to manage all the operational complexities while continuously supporting our partner brands as they scale up. MarketLeap holds brands’ inventory in its fully outsourced supply-chain network while offering better payment terms than marketplaces. The company uniquely invests in partner brands, contributes to marketing expenses, optimizes listings, and supports various other initiatives,” explains COO and co-founder Mekki Mouaddeb.
Many other e-commerce players, such as Amazon aggregators or accelerators, focus primarily on rapid growth of decelerating brands, which can result in tech debt and inefficiencies further down the line. By putting the technology platform first, MarketLeap firmly prioritizes the establishment of a robust tech foundation to scale profitable businesses, and is fully tailored to the needs of digitally native brands driven to grow.
“We have proven so far that our proprietary technology can help us screen, launch, and scale brands on multiple e-commerce marketplaces incredibly efficiently. This new funding round will allow us to speed up our rich feature suite while expanding even faster into new channels and countries. Our aim is to build a complete new layer of tech infrastructure that seamlessly connects thousands of brands to hundreds of marketplaces,” Benkirane concludes.
