Vivino Wine App Grabs $1 Million Series A Funding From Creandum

    I’m sure a nice bottle of wine is getting opened in Copenhagen today. Vivino, the Danish wine app, has announced it has received $1 million in Series A funding from Creandum. Last year, the app received seed funding from SEED Capital and Skype co-founder Janus Friis.

    Instead of focusing completely on wine discovery, Vivino takes the opposite direction to help you remember the bottles you’ve drank. That makes it sound like an app for alcoholics, but it really solves the problem when you really like the red you’ve had at your friend’s party, but can’t remember what it was the next day. To use the app, all you do is take a picture of the bottle and the image matching algorithm figures out everything about the bottle of wine – and even gives you a map view of where the winery is located. If you use the app discretely enough, you can come across as an expert.

    I’ve been using Vivino since we first covered it last April to help remember what cheap jugs of rot-gut leaves the best impression on me. But I’m not alone, use of Vivino has increased tenfold in the last six months, reaching nearly 100,000 monthly downloads. In November, “active users” on average scanned 7 bottles a month, so the app is getting re-opened fairly regularly.

    Wine is a $125 billion market, and Vivino is positioning themselves to make choosing and purchasing wine “as fun as social as drinking it.”

    “Vivino has all the characteristics of a great investment: seasoned team, innovative technology, elegant product, viable business model, and a very large market ripe for disruption,” said Creandum General Partner Martin Hauge, who has joined Vivino’s board of directors. “In short order Vivino has become the fastest growing wine app in the world, and we believe has the potential to change wine ecommerce forever – much like Spotify is doing with music.”