Utrecht-based startup FlorAccess has raised 750.000 euro from a group of e-commerce investors. Neither the stage of the funding round nor the names of the investors have been disclosed. But given the size of the round our estimation is that it concerns, for Dutch standards, a large seed round. The startup aims to use the capital raised to expand to the UK, Germany and France. For FlorAccess this entails that in the coming months more people will be added to its team and working on the facilitating the necessary logistics infrastructure necessary for the expansion.
Founded in 2012, FlorAccess is a B2B e-commerce platform for all kind of plants. Wholesalers, garden centers, and florists can buy directly from breeders and growers of plants. The startup claims to have 80 selected breeders on the platform offering a variety of their products. FlorAccess also claims to have a unique position and businessmodel. It doens’t keep its own stock of products, offering in actually the intelligence software layer to come to a transaction for sellers and buyers in the space.
Ewoud Goorts, founder and CEO of FlorAcces, says in an interview with StartupJuncture that he got inspired by AirBnB and Alibaba to build FlorAccess. Goorts: “We started the company because we found the supply chain in this tradiational industry consisted of too many players. We decided to form an online B2B platform cutting out unnecessary players in the middle.”
Seamless purchasing process
Cutting out the middleman has many advantages according to Goorts. “By keeping the stock at the breeders, we can ensure the freshest products and keep our operational cost low. We transfer this price advantage to our customers, giving them in effect a higher quality product at reduced cost”, he says.
Simlyfying the purchasing process is another objective of FlorAccess. This focus has enabled the company to gain traction in over fifteen, mainly European, countries. Tom Hogewind, CTO of FlorAccess: “Our technology allows customers to find products in milliseconds. Our main goal, however, is to provide a simple and user-friendly way to find and buy the best products. The whole order process, from product-search to aftercare, is handled in a way that people are accustomed to in modern consumer webshops.” This ‘modern’ way webshop consumers are accustomed also means that the service is platform agnotic and facilitates trade around the clock.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
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