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Elenas estimates that 11 million ladies in Latin America promote client objects by way of catalogs and door-to-door gross sales strategies. It is digitizing that course of to allow them to extra simply promote from dwelling.
Founder and CEO Zach Oschin began the Colombia-based social commerce firm in 2018 (and took part in our Latin American Startup Battlefield that yr) to maneuver the normal unbiased gross sales course of on-line.
Here’s the way it works: Entrepreneurs can browse a portfolio of lots of of hundreds of wholesale merchandise in areas like magnificence, private care, dwelling items and electronics, determine what they need to promote, how a lot they need to mark up the worth after which promote the merchandise on social channels like WhatsApp and Facebook.
Elenas additionally takes care of the product sourcing, supply and cost assortment. In the previous yr, greater than 100,000 ladies in Colombia and Mexico have offered over 2 million orders and earned thousands and thousands of {dollars} on the platform.
To speed up that trajectory, Elenas raised $2 million in seed funding in 2020 and one other $6 million in Series A capital in 2021. Now the corporate is again with an excellent greater Series B spherical of $20 million. This offers the corporate greater than $28 million in complete funding to this point.
While Oschin didn’t go into element on Elenas’ valuation, he did say it was a rise from the earlier spherical. He additionally mentioned the corporate grew income over 5x between the rounds.
DILA Capital leads this new funding and is joined by FJ Labs, Endeavor Catalyst, the Inter-American Development Bank’s IDB Lab, Broadhaven Ventures, Mercado Libre, Grupo Bolivar and Leo Capital.
“Elenas is revolutionizing the direct-sales industry by giving millions of people across the region the opportunity to sell thousands of products through their digital catalog,” mentioned Alejandro Diez Barroso, managing associate at DILA Capital, in a written assertion. “We are convinced that we are backing the right team in the right market and at the right time.”
Being a rustic with thrice the inhabitants of Colombia, Mexico is poised to be the corporate’s largest market within the subsequent yr, and it has already “achieved a profitable and sustainable growth model” there, Oschin mentioned.
Since launching there in 2021, Elenas was capable of scale up 30%, which implies Mexico accounts for greater than a 3rd of its enterprise in only one yr, which he mentioned took two-and-a-half years to attain in Colombia.
This is whereas different e-commerce firms haven’t fared as properly, Oschin mentioned. For instance, he notes that by beginning with decrease ticket objects like with grocery supply, some firms weren’t capable of attain the correct margin profile or construct out infrastructure to the extent wanted to achieve profitability.
“There was a massive boom of social commerce companies heavily funded in 2021, but that also meant the rise of social commerce models that were highly unprofitable,” Oschin added. “Some achieve unicorn status, and we are now seeing some of those models pulling back, shut down or laying off staff.”
He went on to elucidate that Elenas bucked this pattern by specializing in nonperishable objects, like life-style merchandise, dwelling items, vogue and equipment, from the start, which yielded extra wholesome revenue margins and better ticket costs.
Not having to construct its personal infrastructure was one other method. That mannequin enabled the corporate to scale throughout Colombia and Mexico and ship to 600 cities, together with rural areas the place that had not been beforehand completed.
In addition to rising income 5x between the Series A and Series B rounds, the corporate greater than doubled its worker headcount to 230 folks.
Up subsequent, Elenas will proceed to develop its vendor community in each markets with give attention to scaling it up considerably over the following yr in order that it could actually spend money on higher merchandise and experiences for each sellers and suppliers.
It may even infuse some capital into engineering and product to construct out extra core options, for instance, vendor enterprise administration instruments like buyer relationship administration, product suggestions and monetary providers.
“We want to expand into financial services that power their businesses,” Oschin mentioned. “Fifty percent of our sellers have never had a bank account before, so this is an underbanked population, and when running a business, having financial services is important. Our partnership with Grupo Bolivar will be working on that.”
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