Venture Capital News: INTURN Lands $3.6M
2015-04-21
NEW YORK, NY, Retail technology innovator announced it recently completed a $3.6 million capital raise.
INTURN, a retail technology innovator, today announced the launch of its B2B software solution that reinvents the way fashion brands and retailers sell and purchase off-price inventory of apparel, footwear and accessories. The Company also announced it recently completed a $3.6 million capital raise led by retail technology investor Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures, and included Novel TMT Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Bobby Lent co-founder of Ariba, T5 Capital and original investor Beanstalk Ventures.
Each year, an estimated $250 billion of off-price apparel inventory is sold globally. To sell that inventory, brands rely on manual and inefficient tools and processes. This delays offering product for sale and limits the number of buyers who are offered the product. The result - brands are impacted by unnecessary discounts causing billions of dollars of lost revenue and most off-price buyers don't see or properly evaluate the inventory they are most likely to buy.
INTURN enables brands and retailers to buy and sell excess inventory in a private and secure marketplace with detailed product information, tailored transaction rules and powerful analytics to evaluate the inventory.
Ronen Lazar, INTURN's CEO and Co-Founder, is a visionary in the tech industry and has pioneered new innovations on liquidating excess inventory. Along with his partners Charlie Ifrah and Israel Schachter, Lazar saw an opportunity to innovate this retail space.
'Brands have been selling their excess inventory to retailers in linear fashion using Excel spreadsheets for too long. It's archaic and massively inefficient. Most buyers have been handcuffed to buying what they are offered not what they want. And because selling off price is a by-product of their core business, brands end up selling to buyers who may not be the optimal buyers for their inventory. This is costing both sides billions of dollars a year,' said Lazar. 'We built INTURN to save brands and buyers time, hassle, and money.'
To help build a solution that addresses the many industry specific problems, Lazar partnered with Beanstalk Ventures, the newly formed seed investment firm launched by Ken Seiff, founder of Bluefly, and Novel TMT, the technology investment arm of Silas Chou and his family.
'This is the last frontier untouched by retail technology. While nearly every aspect of the retail experience has been automated, the sale of off-price inventory remains a very manual and inefficient process,' said Ken Seiff, Managing Partner of Beanstalk Ventures.
Kirsten Green, Founder of Forerunner Ventures continued, ''The team at INTURN has brought to life an incredibly powerful platform that stands to reshape the multi-billion dollar global off-price apparel market and beyond. We had been waiting for someone to address this need and huge opportunity; Ronen and Charlie brought the right amount of technical know-how and industry insight and connections to make it happen.'
To innovate at this massive scale, Lazar has assembled a team with deep and varied experience from companies such as Amazon, eBay and Google. He also enlisted industry veterans Michael Newman and David Margolis to help guide the company. Newman previously was Vice Chairman, COO and CFO of Ralph Lauren. Margolis was Founder and President of The TJX Companies' Winners division.
About INTURN
INTURN is the first global marketplace to efficiently and easily sell end-of-season/excess inventory to retailers in private online showrooms. INTURN's first vertical focus is specifically built for fashion and apparel brands. This marketplace provides automated tools to replace what is a manual, painstaking, error-prone process. The result is a solution that provides a powerful opportunity to increase profitability. INTURN is designed and led by retail industry veterans and technology experts. For more information visit www.inturn.co.
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