Seeking to make things alles klar for DTC brands, Klar raises €2.3 million

Munich-based Klar has raised €2.3 million in a seed funding round as the company wants to put an end to running an e-commerce business from spreadsheets, offering SME e-commerce brands a single source of business intelligence truthiness. The funding will be used to further develop the platform, as well as significantly expand both the data science and engineering teams. 

Founded in January of 2021 by Maximilian Rast, Cillié Burger, and Frank Birzle, like many a startup, Klar is the result of a problem with no suitable solution. In this case, while serving as interim CMO at direct-to-consumer brand YFood, Rast evaluated over 20 different tools that would help manage the company’s data and deliver actionable insights that would provide a competitive advantage.

Having collaborated previously at African e-commerce retailer Jumia and Germany’s digital private health insurance platform ottonova, Rast, Burger and Birzle, set out to build the solution that Rast was after.

"Shopify has armed the rebels. We will now turn them into an army that powers itself by providing insights, knowledge, and direction.” - Max Rast

“Our goal with Klar is to provide 95% of e-commerce brands with 95% of the value a world-class in-house team could generate, in 5% of the time and cost,” said Burger.

By scraping relevant data from third-party sources, Klar gives direct-to-consumer brands a better understanding of their financial situation, customer purchasing patterns, and marketing efficiency, and offers them up in one homogenised dashboard.

After meeting Rast’s requirements, the trio accurately sensed that they couldn’t be the only ones in need of such an offer. So accurate was their assumption that over 80 brands including Snocks, Every Foods, and the humourless Mammaly quickly pounced on a closed-beta invite.

“With our unified, yet customizable data model we can reflect the reality our customers operate in and, in turn, provide them with accurate reports, meaningful benchmarks, and detailed insights,” commented Rast.

Klar’s €2.3 million seed funding round was led by Cherry Ventures and saw participation from a number of angel investors including Benedikt Sauter (Xentral), Moritz Weisbrodt (Alaiko), Malte Horeyseck and Philipp Triebel (SellerX), Samir El-Sabini (Juni), Benjamin Kremer (YFood), plus the founders of Moss, DTC Ventures, and OMR (the artist formerly known as Online Marketing Rockstars).

“We’re so excited Max, Cillié and Frank joined forces again to build Klar. They know firsthand the struggles that brands face as they try to gain valuable insights into their data and growth journey,” concludes Cherry Ventures’ Christian Meerman. “As e-commerce sales continue to rapidly grow, achieving data fluency and transparency is a must. We believe Klar’s vertical and dedicated approach will ultimately replace a lot of the horizontal software out there that brands currently have to stitch together.”