Zalora, a Zappos-style fashion e-commerce site in South East Asia backed by the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet incubator in Germany, is today announcing its latest investment — $100 million, led by Rocket Internet itself, along with regular Samwer investing partners Summit Partners, Investment AB Kinnevik, Verlinvest and Tengelmann Group. The is the largest investment in Zalora to date, and one… → Read More
Rocket Internet, the German-based e-commerce startup incubator from the Samwer brothers, is today announcing another round of funding for its strategy to build out its footprint into emerging markets. Today it’s the turn of Middle-East-based fashion commerce site Namshi, which is getting $13 million from Summit Partners. This is the second time Summit, a Rocket regular, has invested in Namshi… → Read More
The food delivery wars continue to heat up: today foodpanda, the Rocket Internet-incubated startup that offers a one-stop service to order food from a selection of restaurants and take-out joints to be brought to your door and now working with some 15,000 restaurants globally, is today announcing that it has picked up over $20 million in funding, with participation from Rocket regular AB Kinnevik… → Read More
Rocket Internet, the Samwer brothers’ Berlin-based incubator that runs a vast global empire of e-commerce startups, is picking up a new, sizeable investor in Brazil. The Cisneros Group, the Latin American media powerhouse that owns TV, digital, and other assets, is investing up to $20 million in Mobly, a Brazil-based home furnishings site. Victor Kong, chief digital officer of the Cisneros Group… → Read More
Zalora, Rocket Internet‘s pan-Asian fashion retail site, has launched an iOS app, as it seeks to capture the growing base of consumers in Asia who are using smartphones as their primary, and sometimes only, way of getting online. → Read More
UPDATE: A spokesman from Zalora Taiwan said: To better serve Taiwan on its business operations model, the company has decided to conduct a review to make changes – From April, we are shifting part of Taiwan’s operations to our regional headquarters in Singapore. During this migration period, our company will temporarily disable operations of the Taiwanese site. We sincerely apologize for any… → Read More
There is no single mobile payment company in Europe that has reached the scale and stature that Square has in the U.S., where the Jack Dorsey-led startup processed $1 billion in transactions in 2012. Payleven, one of the many mobile payment startups that want to take that crown on the other side of the pond, is today announcing two more steps in its strategy to convince businesses and consumers to… → Read More
Today, HotelQuickly, a Hong Kong-headquarted startup whose team is comprised of a number of ex-Rocket Internet executives, launches its last-minute hotel booking app which not only bears more than a little resemblance to San Francisco-based HotelTonight, but appears to borrow heavily from the Samwer brothers’ playbook, too. → Read More
In a move that somewhat deviates from the Samwer brothers’ usual playbook, Rocket Internet’s DropGifts, the social gifting platform that lets users send each other gift cards and claim product samples offered by brands, is launching a dedicated B2B play starting with the U.S. market first rather than its home turf of Europe or via a land grab in developing markets. → Read More
Zalora, a Singaporean fashion and beauty e-tailer backed by Rocket Internet, has scooped up €20 million (about $26 million USD) from German retail conglomerate Tengelmann Group, just six months after it landed an undisclosed sum from JP Morgan. In addition, Zalora told us it has also started building a regional software development center in Singapore to develop its Web platform, as well as… → Read More
Rocket Internet, the e-commerce startup incubator started by the Samwer Brothers, is once again ramping up its operations in emerging markets. Today it is announcing that Jumia, an Amazon clone launched last year in Africa, has received a €20 million ($26 million) investment from Summit Partners. Jumia is already active in Nigeria, Egypt and Morocco, and the company says that it will be using… → Read More
Rocket Internet-backed FoodPanda, an online platform for aggregating and delivering food from take-out restaurants, has expanded into two more emerging markets and also launched its first mobile app on Android and iOS. The FoodPanda delivery service apes the likes of GrubHub in the U.S., or Just-Eat or Delivery Hero in Europe but in classic Rocket style it’s taking the model to emerging markets. → Read More
Another Rocket Internet-incubated e-commerce company gets a significant cash injection today: Linio, the so-called ‘Amazon of Latin America’, has raised a €20 million (~$26.5m) round from previous backer Summit Partners. It’s also the second investment for Linio this month after German retail company Tengelmann Group announced it had invested a “8-digit Euro sum”, reportedly somewhere in the… → Read More
A double-dose of details today about the normally secretive e-commerce startups incubated by the Samwer bothers-backed Rocket Internet. Silvio Berlusconi was outed as one of the key investors in Square clone Payleven; and Zalando, inspired by Zappos in the U.S., is reporting 2012 net sales of €1.15 billion and reaching breakeven in its core markets of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. → Read More
The race for leadership in easy e-commerce in Europe is on. Stripe, the U.S. startup that has developed a simple payments API for developers to use in apps and on the web, is preparing to make its first steps into European waters with a beta launch. And the news comes as Rocket Internet-backed rival/clone Paymill, which also offers developers an API for simple payments (at comparable… → Read More
Payleven, the mobile payment company from the Samwer bothers’ Rocket Internet incubator, is now taking orders for its chip-and-PIN readers, which it says makes it one of the first of the Square-style competitors in Europe to offer quick way to comply with Visa’s card payment requirements in the region. The readers were first announced in October 2012; today Payleven starts to take orders — at a… → Read More
FoodPanda, a Rocket Internet-backed online platform for aggregating and delivering food from take-out restaurants, is today announcing that it has expanded to 12 more emerging markets, taking the total number of countries that it covers to 23. The company is also in the process of raising money to help fuel the growth, essential to compete against the likes of GrubHub in the U.S., or Just-Eat or … → Read More
Payleven, the Rocket Internet-incubated mobile-payment service that uses a dongle attached to a mobile device to make and process card transactions — yes, like Square — is today announcing that it has picked up another round of funding, as well as a new investor. As has been the case with many past investments in Samwer-incubated startups, neither the exact funding figure, nor the investor, have… → Read More
Paymill, the cloud-based payment provider backed by the Samwer Brothers’ Rocket Internet startup incubator, is taking one more step to build out its Stripe-like service: it has signed a deal with PAY.ON, an international payment services aggregator that works with services like Amazon Payments to enable e-commerce services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed in a statement issued by… → Read More
Paymill, the Rocket-Internet incubated online payments company that works like developer-friendly Stripe by offering users an API to quickly integrate card transactions, is today announcing that it has picked up €10 million ($13.2 million) in funding. Rocket regular Holtzbrinck Ventures participated, along with new investor Sunstone Capital, a backer of companies like Prezi and Trunk. Rocket… → Read More
The Samwer Brothers and Rocket Internet are not slowing down in the new year with the rollout of new online properties to further populate their e-commerce empire. What’s perhaps surprising, given the current economic climate in Europe, is that the latest effort is taking on the luxury goods industry: Emeza (sounds like Amaze-ah) follows in the footsteps of sites like Net-a-Porter by offering… → Read More
Rocket Internet is sometimes known for being reticent on how its vast e-commerce portfolio is progressing, but that appears to be slowly changing. Today the company put out its first numbers for Glossybox, its beauty box effort that looks a lot like Birchbox. → Read More
Another new chapter is opening up for Rocket Internet, the incubator started and run by the Samwer Brothers in Germany. The company is today announcing that PPR, luxury and sport & lifestyle group, is taking a €10 million investment in Bigfoot I, the Rocket holding company that controls Russian fashion commerce site Lamoda, South American fashion site Dafiti and also has a stake in Namshi… → Read More
HelloFresh, the subscription service that sends users a recipe and the needed fresh ingredients so that they can get busy in the kitchen, has announced that it’s raised a new round of funding from Vorwerk Ventures, along with original backers, the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet, Holtzbrinck Ventures and Kinnevik. The amount is only being disclosed as a “high seven figure sum”, though TechCrunch… → Read More
Amazon’s global march has yet to take it into emerging markets like Vietnam and Malaysia, so the Samwer brothers have smelled an opportunity to build out their own version in the absence of Amazon itself. Lazada, an Asia-focused “online shopping mall” that has come out of the bothers’ German incubator Rocket Internet, is today announcing an investment of $40 million to build out its business. → Read More
Pricepanda, the Rocket Internet-fuelled South East Asian online price comparison venture founded in May this year and rumoured to be backed by less than €10 million ($12.8 million), has added Indonesia to its nascent family of sites — having kicked off with Pricepanda launches in Malaysia and Singapore earlier this autumn. → Read More
E-commerce, by its very nature, is an online business, but you can’t always get away from the expense of bricks and mortar entirely. And so it is with the Samwer brothers‘ Zalando, which originally launched as a Zappos clone but has since expanded from shoes into general fashion. It has announced that it’s secured long-term debt financing of €40.7 million (approx. $52.6m), from Commerzbank… → Read More
Less than a month after reportedly sinking $40-80 million into Lamoda, Rocket Internet’s “Russian Zappos”, JP Morgan is investing once again in the Samwer brothers and their vision for a global e-commerce operation: the latest is Zalora, Rocket Internet’s fashion site based in Singapore and operating across seven countries in South East Asia. The investment comes just eight months after the site… → Read More
Less than a month after JP Morgan put investments into two Rocket Internet-baked fashion sites modelled on Zappos — an undisclosed investment into Zalando and $45 million in Brazil’s Dafiti, the bank is taking an equity stake in a third Rocket Internet fashion business. Lamoda.ru in Russia, a site with 5 million unique users and 500,000 “loyal customers,” is apparently raising between $40… → Read More
Rocket Internet, the incubator/investment vehicle from the Samwer brothers, is known to move fast: Today, news comes that Payleven, its recently outed Square-clone, has opened its doors in the UK, Netherlands, Poland and Brazil, in addition to its existing operation in native Germany. That looks like the beginnings of a pretty ambitious international expansion plan and will certainly keep European… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
