E-commerce packaging startup Flora Lux Capital, Correlation Ventures, Climate Capital and Gokul Rajaram, an investor group, has come out of stealth mode with $9 million in seed funding.
Also known as an aggregator, the company acquires and develops brands – in Flora’s case – focused on providing sustainable products and reducing carbon emissions. Co-founders and CEO Mitat Ulubai and Ugur Kaya started the company in 2021 and it now has more than 50 brands on board.
Before starting the company, Ulubai was a private equity investor and former Goldman Sachs investment banker working in technology and e-commerce investments. Kaya was at Goldman Sachs’ investment bank, focusing on consumer retail M&A.
The company is among a handful of e-commerce aggregators, including OpenStore, that recently received venture capital funding in what has been a not-so-good year for the industry.
Perhaps what sets Flora apart from other e-commerce aggregators is a proprietary assessment tool that asks members questions about their daily behavior and then uses that information to measure their carbon footprint and suggest specific products to help reduce that footprint.
“These smaller brands often can’t target a large audience, so we’re making it accessible to eco-conscious people,” Ulubai told TechCrunch.
Flora is still in the early stages, so Ulubai has not had many growth parameters to describe at the moment. In the year It said it has a waiting list for the marketplace, which will launch in the fourth quarter of 2022. Its flagship brands are reaching more than 300,000 customers and saving 10,000 tons of carbon emissions, equivalent to the impact of 400,000 trees. . The marketplace will house Flora’s brands and sell other independent brands with similar eco-conscious missions.
Apart from Lux Capital, Corporation Ventures, Climate Capital and Gokul Rajaram, other investors participating in the seed round include D4 Ventures, Esas Ventures, Paragon Ventures and 23 Fund. Individual investors include Commons’ Firat and Fateh Isbaker, Livespace’s Ramakant Sharma, Tubular Labs’ Rob Gable, and additional executives and investors from Amazon, Apple, DoorDash, Goldman Sachs, Silverlake, and SoftBank.
Ulubai intends to use the funding received in 2021 to develop new brands, technology development and product development for the Life Cycle Assessment tool and its future products.
“We are starting next month in beta mode and after that we will officially announce the marketplace,” he added. “Our goal is to build an additional portfolio and access hundreds of brands that help customers. We want to be the ‘Michael Guide’ to sustainability.”
