Thrasio, an acquirer of Amazon third-party private-label businesses, has closed on a $260 million Series C round of funding, giving it a pre-money valuation of $1 billion, Thrasio co-founder and co-CEO Joshua Silberstein told Crunchbase News on Wednesday.
He said that Thrasio is the fastest-profitable company in the U.S. to achieve unicorn status, which is “a nice benchmark to hit.”
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“We have worked our asses off to get where we are,” Silberstein added. “We are more focused on running the business than anything else. We care that our turnover rate is less than 1 percent and that we’ve gotten revenue, real profit and business success, which translated into the valuation.”
Advent International led the equity round, he said. The new funding brings the startup’s total funding raised to date to $520.5 million and marks its fourth investment in a year’s time.
David Mussafer, Advent’s managing partner, said in a statement that Thrasio is the investor’s first growth equity investment from its $2 billion technology fund.
“Thrasio is a leader in a $200 billion, fast-growing and highly fragmented market,” he added. “They’re not just enhancing and accelerating e-commerce, they’re helping to revolutionize it. We look forward to supporting Thrasio’s continued growth through M&A and expansion into new channels and services.”
How it works
Thrasio, based in Medfield, Massachusetts, finds “category-leading” essential brands on Amazon, and buys them from the small business owners. To date, the company has acquired nearly 60 Amazon businesses, including 17 in the last quarter. In addition, more than $300 million in pro forma revenue and 6,000 products, makes Thrasio one of the top 25 sellers on Amazon, Silberstein said.
“Amazon is a complicated place, so one of the ways we create value is by looking at the brand to see if it is a high-quality product in the space,” he added. “Once that is identified, we see if the business will rank well organically, have ongoing success and is in a category that is unlikely to become obsolete in five years.”
The company is used to moving quickly. You might remember the article we wrote back in April about the company’s $110 million round of financing, which also touted Thrasio’s success in a short period of time.
At the time, we wrote that serial entrepreneurs Silberstein and Carlos Cashman founded the company in mid-2018 and were quietly building their business, which has doubled its revenue every 73 days, the company said. It also includes more than 300 employees and consultants across 11 cities, adding more than 90 new people since April.
Going after the competitive advantage
Meanwhile, Silberstein said that despite Amazon’s struggles during the global pandemic, it is still a place where tens of thousands of entrepreneurs have become millionaires because they were able to operate on the e-commerce platform, he said.
“It’s easy to poke at them, but everyone takes it for granted that you can get whatever you need,” he added.
In addition, Thrasio is sitting on a unique moment in the consumer products industry—a $13 trillion market. For the first time in four decades, the competitive advantage that legacy brands once held has disappeared within the past five years and are being rewritten, Silberstein said.
That means there is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence to take the massive puzzle that is the consumer products market, and see who has a shot at capturing the competitive advantage, he added.
“We are in a position to see lots of things about how consumers are buying and buying on Amazon, Shopify and retail, and how they will work together and are able to be perceived,” he said. “The better we understand what the market will look like, the better position we will be in to say the people who control these certain areas will be the winners.”
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias
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