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Estonian seed-stage venture fund invests in Spanish startup

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Tallinn-headquartered VC fund Trind Ventures led the Madrid-based startup Webel‘s €550K round. The round was also joined by Tiburon, a superangel fund from Daniel Wild and Felix Artmann, and other well-known business angels like Hugo Arévalo, founder of ThePowerMBA and investor in the 5 Spanish’s current/future unicorns like Glovo or Playtomic. The startup builds a marketplace that would allow users to easily search, book and enjoy almost any service in the comfort of their homes. The funding will help Webel grow and expand.

Webel was founded by Nacho Tejero Mancho, Carlos Estévez Rincón, Guillermo Urquijo & Javier Ginés Sánchez at the university. They suddenly realized that its impact was greater than expected: the app went viral at launch both for clients & professionals.

However, the real challenge was not about users’ needs, but building a model that could be profitable & scalable. Many other startups that had tried before struggled with this, mainly due to low client repetition caused by platform leakage (users disintermediating the platform for future services once they met).and

Nacho Tejero, its CEO, says “If you want people to repeat their order through your platform (hence paying a commission), the value created for both parties for doing so (easier, faster, more comfortable…) has to be greater than the economic value (take rate) you are taking from the transaction. If not, people will go off-platform.”

With this approach, not only they built an app where clients can book their services in 5 clicks, but also worked around creating value for their supply. For that, they built SaaS tools for them (e.g., Calendar, notifications, automated invoices…) to easily manage their services, as well as an algorithm that would compare the professional’s repetition with its peers and reward most loyal suppliers with higher visibility and a lower commission. And it worked incredibly well: on average, each customer currently books ~8 services a year, which resulted in being +75% of their GMV coming from repeat customers.

Despite having grown 23% monthly for 13 consecutive months, they “do not have enough”.

As Nacho says, “now it’s time to bring Webel to millions of people’s hands, one by one. We have proved our model to be profitable & scalable, and with the funds raised, we want to achieve a larger scale. We will be soon expanding into new markets like Italy or Portugal.” They started in Madrid, but have already expanded into Barcelona, which already represents 15% of their total GMV thanks to a 55% MoM growth for the past 4 months, and their goal is “to become the global market leader. We are going to create the biggest company in our sector”.


“We believe in Webel’s data-driven team. They have great energy and are focusing on the right problems of scaling the services marketplace. It’s indeed an incredibly challenging sector, but Webel seems to have solved it and therefore created a huge opportunity with it” says Peeter Kompus, Investment Manager at Trind Ventures.

The news comes as Webel crosses the 3,000 services delivered per month thanks to massive growth in the past weeks.

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Nurcin Metingil
Nurcin Metingil
A permanent student, a passionate first reader and nowadays doing master’s degree in Publishing Management. Beside these, I am up for games! I have been playing games since I was 6. Now, I am whispering "Business. Business. Numbers. Is this working?"

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