- Zero-fee wholesale marketplace company recently announced that it raised $12 million in Series A funding
Tundra, a zero-fee wholesale marketplace company recently announced that it raised $12 million in Series A funding. This round of funding was led by Annie Kadavy of Redpoint with participation Initialized Capital, Peterson Ventures, FJ Labs, Switch Ventures, and Background Capital.
According to TechCrunch, Tundra was originally launched by married CEO Arnold Engel and COO Katie Engel. They had previously launched a supply chain company called Vox Supply Chain. While building Vox Supply Chain, the married couple team found the wholesale market was inefficient in many ways ranging from disorganized trade shows and the transaction fees from incumbents along with a lot of the business around deals still being by traditional methods.
Through Tundra, suppliers can list their product on the platform and buyers can come to the platform to shop for products. The products feature ratings, reviews, supplier metrics, and free shipping with tracking.
“The wholesale market is set up to benefit big businesses, with other platforms and distributors charging anywhere from 5 percent to 30 percent commission,” said Arnold Engel via TechCrunch. “That can be particularly pronounced for small businesses.”
The Tundra team is looking to eliminate the time-consuming process of negotiating deals at trade shows and the cost of simply buying and selling wholesale products.
How does Tundra generate revenue? The company has premium options during checkout like faster shipping, order insurance, and additional custom clearance and logistics services for international orders.
Kadavy spent more than a year working as the Head of Strategic Operations at Uber Freight and is familiar with the pain points of the wholesale market.
“Tundra is building a consumer-grade front end product atop an enterprise-grade logistics and payments backend to serve their needs. Optimizing for ease of use and consistency increases trust on both sides of a marketplace. And, trust translates to long term defensibility,” wrote Kadavy in a blog post. “The Millennial consumer is more discerning than previous generations. Demand for personalization is forcing the fragmentation of retail. And that requires retailers to be more agile. They need to transact on lower MOQs at a higher frequency and have a navigation layer to search an increasingly long-tail of products to meet their customers’ wants and needs.”
