Announcing Merama

We’re delighted today to announce our involvement in the Seed and Series A rounds of Merama. This investment felt like a very natural extension of both a great founder relationship and our experience over the last 10–15 years of how ecommerce has evolved in Europe.

I have written many times about Sujay Tyle, one of the co-founders of Merama. Sujay has many outstanding achievements in his locker, not least of which was co-founding, building and successfully exiting Frontier Car Group, where we were also investors. Sujay joined us as a venture partner in the middle of last year but we knew it would not be long before he was knee-deep in his next venture. As we had seen before, Sujay has the ability to move at lightning speed while finding incredible business partners and hiring exceptionally well. He did not disappoint when he introduced us to his new co-founders for Merama — Felipe, Olivier, Renato and Guilherme. It has been a pleasure to get to know them and the rest of the team.

As a firm, we have invested in ~20 ecommerce companies over the last 15 years and have become very familiar with what it takes to build category champions. We know this requires excellence across supply chain, logistics, back and front end technology, customer experience and support, brand, product positioning, working capital management and much more. In Europe, the market is well developed and many big ecommerce players have been crowned champions.

With Frontier Car Group we got to know the LatAm market better as they were operational in Mexico and Chile. It will come as no surprise that eCommerce penetration there is much lower than market and growth is higher (in fact Mexico was the fastest growing eCom market globally last year). Out of this, category leaders are beginning to emerge but they have typically not yet developed their tech stacks, supply chains etc to the optimal state. Crucially, it is also very hard for these players to access working capital financing and so they are often constrained on how fast they can grow. Enter Merama, who is partnering with these players (by becoming a majority shareholder) and developing best-in-class tech, marketing, supply chain management and more, allowing its partners to leverage these tools. Merama is also able to secure robust debt facilities which the partners can also access. Together Merama and its partners can turbocharge these businesses.

Merama is already partnering with players who expect to generate $100m GMV this year. They did that in 5 months. Today they announce $60m in equity and $100m in debt which will be used to go even faster. We’re excited to be partnering with Monashees, Valor, Triplepoint and many other outstanding co-investors.

Through Merama, we are watching the LatAm ecommerce market unfold before our eyes.