If you’ve been following us for a while, it shouldn’t be surprising that we like marketplaces. Since 2018, we’ve been first-check investors to founders all across EU/MENA building platforms that aggregate supply/demand in many different verticals: from spareparts (Mtor), to capital (Primary Portal and Kennek), to food (HomeCooks) and Pharma (Vamstar). At their core, these transactional propositions focus on the three key pillars of every marketplace: delivering efficiency, transparency, and trust. A win-win-win. What’s not to love?
One area and subset of marketplaces we’re particularly excited about is recommerce: the buying and selling of pre-owned goods, often through - you guessed it - marketplaces. It’s a space where the need for efficiency, transparency, and trust becomes even more critical, as every transaction carries a little more friction. Pricing is variable, product quality isn’t guaranteed, and sellers can be informal participants rather than real businesses. Especially with peer-to-peer facing recommerce platforms, where everyday people suddenly need to wear multiple hats like customer service, packaging, and managing logistics, ensuring a smooth experience for both supply/demand can be…. challenging. Below is a neat example of what happens when you burden people with the enormous responsibility of handling packaging and logistics themselves (gotta appreciate the improvisational hustle here)
Complexities like these can create real barriers to scale, but also makes it a dozen times more compelling when a team gets it right. Success in recommerce often hinges on solving multiple pain points simultaneously: creating military-grade levels of trust, ensuring product quality without direct ownership, turning one-off transactions into repeatable behaviour and solving for hard-to-standardise pricing. Easy does it. When all of these elements are in place, recommerce propositions can unlock many new product lines that “normal” marketplaces often can’t: serve as pricing indexes for secondhand goods, take position when margins are clear, and add grading or inspection layers that can boost prices and extend lifetime value.
This article is the first in a series where we’ll go a bit deeper into the different tactics that many of our successful recommerce companies have used, and aim to make recommerce more concrete along the way. Our next article will include a checklist of when recommerce works (and when it doesn’t). In the coming editions, we’ll dive into what makes platforms in this space succeed, who is building what (from used lab equipment and airplane parts to electronic components and even buses) and what to consider if you’re thinking about starting your own.
This includes Vintage Cash Cow (backed in 2019), which is building Europe’s leading platform for old-but-valuable items like watches, jewelry, antiques, and collectibles. It also draws from lessons learned at Metcycle (invested in 2021), which is reimagining end-of-lifecycle metals through its circular marketplace, and Getmobil (invested in 2024) and Northladder (invested in 2023), who are laying the trade-in infrastructure for secondhand electronics in Turkey, the UAE, and our yet-to-be-announced investment in a platform for used vehicles.
Because even though these companies operate in vastly different verticals, the core playbook is surprisingly similar: unlock and optimize the residual value of goods, whether it’s vintage collectibles, scrap aluminum, or used smartphones, by bringing the transaction online, adding trust layers like grading or inspection, and making the whole experience smoother for both sides of the market. Better prices, better experience, better planet. Slam dunk!
