Fonecta's First Minor Investment: Vuole/Savalanche


    Last month we announced that Fonecta, one of the most active startup acquirers in Finland is going to start making minor investments. Today, they have announced their first and it goes to the online marketplace startup – Vuole that has developed the Savalanche e-commerce platform.

    The company was founded back in 2009 in Oulu, and at the time was one of the first to start making Facebook webstores in Finland. Building on top of that experience, they found a gap in the market, where large publishers and some SME’s could benefit from setting up an e-commerce solution on their site. What that basically means is that their platform will enable publishers to quickly embed an online store into their website. On that store, they will then be able to offer products, services or even daily deals from either themselves or their corporate partners.

    So for example ArcticStartup could set-up a store and allow startups to sell their services and products from it. Theoretically we could even make a daily deals site for startups using the platform.

    “We want to support SMEs in discovering the online commerce opportunities by offering cost-efficient and easily adoptable means to selling and marketing”, says Timo Hiltunen, CEO at Fonecta.

    We have been in the Savalanche team about a year a go, while the platform was still in its development stage, and it looked like a viable solution already at the time. Today, they have launched their full commercial version and are ready for mass deployement. According to Fonecta, this was the right time to invest and that they are going to help it scale by offering Vuole’s solutions to more than 70 000 B2B customers of theirs. Unfortunately the investment amount was not disclosed.