Taking a page from the Amazon playbook, Berlin’s cross-selling specialist 35up banks another €5 million

Berlin-based cross-selling specialist 35up has secured another €5 million in funding in a Capnamic-led round.

35up is quite literally taking a page from Amazon’s playbook, where up to 35 percent of sales are derived from cross-selling, that is, the art of pushing related or complementary products to a customer at the point of sale, perhaps better known as “Customers also bought”, and putting this power in the hands of every online merchant.

Now while this process might seem simple on the surface, what’s cooking behind the scenes is Amazon’s ability to not only drive a highly sophisticated matching engine (read: highly expensive and highly time-consuming to create) AND hold a large inventory at the ready (read: also highly expensive).

35up provides every etailer access to this Amazon-like sales benefit via a headless API that keeps tabs on what a shopper has in their basket and runs a series of queries through a proprietary algorithm-based recommendation engine to find the perfect, or near-perfect match via over 4 million products available through an ever-growing vendor network, that ultimately are aimed at converting to a sale.

"The 35up platform precisely solves our cross-selling problem", says Refurbed's Peter Windischhofer. "Since we have full control over the user interface and the products displayed, the experience for our customers is just as good as before."

If this is sounding a bit similar to what Tiger Global-backed Depict.ai has on offer, 35up representatives point out, "While Depict recommends products from within the given stock of a merchant, 35up bases its recommendations on a vast vendor network with millions of products. This allows partnering merchants to cross-sell from a broad range of matching products, both physical and digital, e.g. insurances, without the necessary time-consuming onboarding of these or inventory risks."

While the idea and the execution might not exactly be novel, clearly 35up on to something, having secured approximately €3.4 million via coparion and DvH Ventures back in March of 2021 and now adding another €5 million via Capnamic and the same existing investors.

Explaining the rationale behind Capnamic’s investment, Managing Partner Christian Knott explains, "35up’s platform is a powerful solution and already generates considerable additional sales for existing customers. We are therefore pleased to accompany the experienced founders going forward. We believe that 35up can bring substantial profitable sales to both web shops and the connected vendor network and that breaking the exclusivity of cross-selling will create revolutionary opportunities for e-commerce.”