elopage, Europe’s fastest-growing SaaS platform and payment provider for digital entrepreneurs, creators, SMEs and enterprise businesses, announced the successful completion of its funding round of USD 38 million (EUR 32 million) to empower digital businesses at all stages of growth. The Series A round, which is the SaaS company’s first-ever funding round, is backed by leading tech investors including lead investor Target Global as well as France-based Partech Ventures and U.S.-based Avid Ventures.
The financing comes at a time of significant growth for elopage, which had previously been bootstrapped and has been profitable since 2018. elopage already is the platform and payment provider of choice for more than 40,000 digital businesses and will use the fresh funding to grow its team from 70 to 190 by the end of the year while accelerating its strong momentum and expansion plans across Europe. The company is also committed to investing further in its proprietary end-to-end platform, with the goal of enabling at least one million businesses to unlock their potential through elopage by 2025.
elopage was founded in 2015 by Özkan Akkilic and Tolga Önal with the mission of empowering and enabling digital entrepreneurs to launch and scale their online businesses by selling digital products, courses, memberships, and subscriptions. The company is capitalizing on the tailwinds around ecommerce, EdTech and flexible work, and is a meaningful contributor to the emerging “creator economy”, which is estimated to be a $38 billion market alone. Digital businesses are faced with administrative and technical hurdles, spending at least ten hours a month on repetitive administrative tasks. elopage’s platform eliminates these barriers to getting a business off the ground and scaling it by supporting automation and helping to drive customer acquisition for digital business owners.
Özkan Akkilic, elopage Gründer und CEO, sagt: “Having gone through the same challenges ourselves, we set out to simplify the process from having an idea to creating a flourishing business. With elopage we wanted to draw on our own experience and act as enablers for digital entrepreneurship to help them focus on what they are truly passionate about: their content. Our end-to-end platform brings a completely reimagined infrastructure to build and scale a business to digital entrepreneurs, allowing a new generation of non-technical entrepreneurs to easily set up, distribute and monetize their content, within three hours, on the go.”
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Tolga Önal, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at elopage, adds: “The investment will empower us to fuel our growth at an unprecedented rate as we continue to build elopage into the preferred SaaS platform and payment provider for digital businesses. We are excited to partner with Target Global, Avid Ventures, and Partech who share our vision and will help us seize the enormous opportunity in front of us. In the context of the current accelerated switch to online, we have seen a surge in digital businesses and creators, adding more than 25.000 new customers during the last 18 months to our platform, including SPORT1, Hubert Burda Verlag, Finanzfluss, and falkemedia.”
elopage delivers a one-stop platform to digital entrepreneurs ranging from solopreneurs and creators to international media platforms with annual sales from 5k EUR to 40m EUR. As a payment provider and content delivery service, the startup combines the power of microservices, offering hundreds of use cases with its flexible features and apps. Users can easily develop and host a tailored website and sales funnels, collect payments, and take care of their tax payments. elopage also provides the infrastructure to deliver content that can be readily shared with the community. By creating a robust product that builds the foundation to scale digital businesses of all sizes and enables a fully branded customer experience, elopage has established trust and loyalty within the community of digital entrepreneurs in Europe.
Bao-Y van Cong, Investment Director at Target Global: “elopage is truly built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs – we were highly impressed by the thoughtful approach that Özkan and Tolga have put into building an end-to-end platform serving more digital entrepreneurs. They have been able to bootstrap their business to this scale as they have listened to their customers carefully and executed with high precision and focus. We are excited to support them as they build on this foundation to double down on growth and continue to scale elopage.”
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Addie Lerner, Founder & Managing Partner at Avid Ventures, and Tali Vogelstein, Founding Investor at Avid Ventures: “elopage has the opportunity to become the Shopify for digital products and services. We are excited about the company’s best-in-class product and early-mover advantage in a market that is at an inflection point: COVID has accelerated a new wave of entrepreneurship fuelled by the adoption of new technologies as well as the desire for the flexible and enjoyable yet lucrative work that elopage enables. We believe Özkan and Tolga are skilled executors with deep insight into their customers and a vision for building a global platform. We are looking forward to supporting elopage throughout this journey.”
Philippe Collombel & Réza Malekzadeh, General Partners at Partech: “Digital entrepreneurship is here to stay and will require a new commerce infrastructure adapted to its needs. We are very impressed by how Özkan and Tolga have identified the trend and been able to build a very solid offering to enable this new market. They have proven they have not only the right vision but also rock-solid execution. We are very excited to be part of the journey backing them and look forward to working with them as they build a world class leader in this space.”
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