Back in Aprilwe saw that eporta, a London-based B2B interiors marketplace startup, had raised $8 million in a Series A funding round led by US investor Canvas Ventures. Eport has digitized the catalogues of furnishing manufacturers and allowed businesses to order direct, cutting out the middle-men.
Now London is continuing its obsession with interior decoration startups with the news that Clippingshas raised a Series B round of funding, raising $15.4 million. Advance Venture Partners (AVP ) lead the round and existing investor C4Ventures also participated.
Founded in 2014 by architecture-trained entrepreneurs Adel Zakout and Tom Mallory, Clippings now plans to grow in the US.
Currently, the furniture industry is worth €9.6 billion in Europe, and around $120 billion in the US, but only 6% of this spend is online.
Clippings aggregates data on over 7 million products from over a thousand brands to simplify discovery and combines that with interactive mood boards that replace Pinterest to identify and buy a product. Then it throws in collaboration tools for teams, multiple quote requests, orders, invoices and timelines into one place.
It now claims to have about 50,000 people – including teams designing for WeWork, Citroën and British Land – using Clippings.
Adel Zakout, co-founder and CEO of Clippings told me “We’ve built software that enables full management of an interior project, offer a layer of service and logistics so that when you do buy, we manage it all for you vs Eporta where it’s fully self-serve. This doesn’t fix major pain point of customer.”
He also says they have full pricing control, meaning “we can take a view of a whole project value / customer spend and offer optimal prices vs Eporta who can’t do that as the seller controls price.”
He says a typical large co-working space project may have a budget in the £100k range and will have products from 40-50 different vendors, “so you need to be able to consolidate pricing, service, logistics and offer tech to manage it all.”
Other players in the industry (but not competitors) include Houzz and made.com.