Startup Fitbay.com has secured an investment of € 1.6 M (12 million DKK) from Creandum and the New York-based Steadfast Venture Capital. The new investment occurs only six months after Fitbay ensured an angel investment from Jesper Buch and Creandum. And that surely is a lot of money, with that kind of money you can get a lot of services from ElitistGaming.
Fitbay has since it start in May 2013 quickly established itself in the international entrepreneurial scene. The new investment, led by Steadfast Venture Capital, will be used to increase product team in Copenhagen and the commercial team in New York, where Fitbay recently opened office.
Opening up their beta
Fitbay works with a new way of making sure people buy clothes in the right sizes online, and thus minimizing returns for eCommerce companies. This service has been in closed beta so far, but today Fitbay also open their public beta.
Fitbay aims to eliminate the guessing game and the uncertainty of whether a garment will fit or not when shopping online, by displaying only products that actually fit the individual user. Fitbay is a new type of social network that segmenting users with similar body types and style preferences in small groups. With relativly simple information the services makes it possible to provide a personalized page with brands and products recommended by other with similar bodies – without having to go through the effort to measure themselves. The idea behind Fitbay came from the founder’s personal experience with buying clothes on the internet.
“We are humbly overwhelmed by the strong interest we have received. Using social shopping we crowdsource information about size and fit from thousands of unique body measures, and thereby display only products that fit – without ever having to use a tape measure.” says Christian Wylonis founder & CEO
With return rates of clothes being as high as 50% for some retailers, the problem of geting the right fit has a large market value. This, combined with problems that sizes differ a lot between different clothing brands and are not optimised for different body types, makes clothing in the right sizes a big issue for retailers.
U.S. investment and more focus on U.S. market
Fitbay says they have always focused on the U.S. market. Over 40% of Fitbays users are Americans and it was therefore a priority to get a U.S. invest on board. The Swedish venture capital fund Creandum is a more established player in the Nordic entrepreneurial environment, with multiple investments in startup here, such as Vivino and Planday.
“We are very proud to invest in Fitbay for the second time in 6 months. User activity on the growth and Fitbay has been very impressive and we look forward to following the development over the next year. We invest because we are convinced that Fitbay has the same potential as Spotify” said Martin Hauge, General Partner at Creandum
If you are interested in the public beta by Fitbay, then get into contact with them.
