ManoMano raises $ 355 million and brings Dragoneer into the capital

ManoMano, the DIY marketplace, enters the very closed club of French start-ups valued at more than $ 2 billion with ContentSquare.

The group, founded in 2013 by Philippe de Chanville and Christian Raisson, has just completed a new funding round of $ 355 million by welcoming the prestigious American technology fund Dragoneer (investors in Airbnb, Spotify, etc.) to its capital. All the other shareholders (Temasek, General Atlantic, Eurozeo, Bpifrance, followed. ManoMano has raised a total of $ 725 million in 8 years. Today, the money is available and investment funds are pressing start-ups promising to collect cash to accelerate their growth.

Because ManoMano, took full advantage of the pandemic in Europe which confined a good part of Europeans to their homes with a furious desire to arrange their interior to telework and an inability to go out to buy the necessary equipment in traditional DIY stores.

Quite naturally, many of them have therefore turned to this online DIY marketplace bringing together 3,600 merchants and 10 million references.

1.2 billion euros in activity

As a result, in 2020, ManoMano simply doubled its business volume to reach 1.2 billion euros and doubled the number of its active customers to 7 million.

Long before the pandemic, ManoMano had led an international expansion in Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Spain as well as a diversification towards building professionals.

"The European DIY market is estimated at 400 billion euros, half of which

goes

to the general public and the other

goes to

professionals,"

explains Christian Raisson.

If the Covid crisis benefited ManoMano, it also pushed the big DIY brands to develop digital solutions.

The European leader, Leroy Merlin and the British Kingfisher have launched but with a click & collect strategy pushing consumers to withdraw their purchases in physical stores.

The concept of ManoMano is already proven.

The company is profitable in France and has reached breakeven at group level over a few months in 2020. In addition, it has a lot of cash on hand.

"Money is abundant today and this fundraising allows us, like American start-ups, to massively accelerate our development"

specifies Philippe de Chanville.

The four pillars of growth

The $ 355 million will therefore be used on the four pillars of growth.

The first is the strengthening of ManoMano's international presence and particularly in Germany and Great Britain, two very promising markets but where ManoMano is not yet recognized.

The French group will launch communication and customer recruitment campaigns there in order to achieve notoriety close to that of the brand in France, where two out of three people know it.

ManoMano will also develop its offer for professionals in Spain and Italy.

The group wants to become a partner of artisans with a range of digital services designed to make their lives easier.

The French scale-up will invest heavily in logistics in order to improve customer service. Today, ManoMano is a marketplace and the suppliers take care of the delivery themselves. The customer experience is therefore, by definition, uneven.

"We hope to manage shipments of 40 to 50% of our business through our own logistics"

explains Christian Raisson. Far from investing heavily in warehouses like Amazon, ManoMano deals with logisticians in the market, which is less expensive.

Finally, ManoMano is and remains a digital company that must invest heavily in its platform.

“We have proven that the platform developed for France is scalable in Europe. But in each country we must develop local specificities such as the sourcing of suppliers, means of payment and transport ”

explains Christian Raisson.

To do so, ManoMano will recruit 1,000 new talents by 2022.

“Data analyst skills specializing in e-commerce capable of processing such a large mass of data are rare in France and in Europe. We have to detect them, seduce them, pay them at the market standard and retain them. Fortunately, ManoMano puts forward human values ​​which make it possible to retain talent, ”

explains Philippe de Chanville.