We are happy to announce our fourth investment by Fund II and the second investment into Spain: Webel.
Webel is an app that brings any service to your doorstep. So far, everything is being brought to our homes: food, consumer goods… However, services (e.g., beauty) have not followed this path… yet. This is what Webel’s team found; since then, they have been building a marketplace that allows users to easily search, book and enjoy almost any service in the comfort of their homes.
Webel was founded by Nacho, Carlos, Guillermo & Javier while at 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).
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.
Nacho Tejero, CEO of Webel
To solve this, Webel built an app where clients can book their services in 5 clicks and 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 +75% of their GMV coming from repeat customers.
Trind led Webel’s €550k round. The round was also joined by Tiburon and well-known business angels like Hugo Arévalo, founder of ThePowerMBA and investor in e.g. Glovo and Playtomic.
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.
Peeter Kompus, Investment Manager at Trind Ventures