Elyn’s try-before-you-buy service checks out as it raises €2.5 million

French try-before-you-buy (TBYB) service Elyn has raised €2.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Headline and Sequoia’s Arc programme.

The round also sees the participation of retail and fintech experts like Motier Venture (Family Office of the owners of the Galeries Lafayette), Financière Saint James (Family Office of Michaël Benabou, co-founder of Veepee), Marc Menasé (Founders Future) and Guillaume Princen (former EMEA director of Stripe).

Founded in 2022 in Elyn offers a fully customisable plug-and-play service to merchants looking to offer free ‘try at home’ options on their online offerings. Customers can try items before paying for them and avail of a free return service on all deliveries. 

“Offering free delivery was unthinkable not so long ago, it is now mandatory. Offering free returns was also unimaginable, it is now mandatory,” says El Mehdi Hachad, co-founder and CEO at Elyn. “As we see e-commerce giants (that are at the forefront of customer experience) implementing try-before-you-buy options, we’re convinced that TBYB is the next ‘new standard’ for e-commerce. We’re at the very beginning of this option’s adoption, and we’re convinced that just like free returns and free shipping, every major e-commerce brand will offer a TBYB option in the next 12 months.” 

Elyn claims that with the TBYB option, more than 20% of customers choose it at checkout, while 80% of them state that they would not have ordered in the first place if it wasn’t there. In the pool of customers choosing Elyn, 80% are net new customers of a given brand. 

“Elyn offers so much more than a payment solution. Hamza and Mehdi started by adding easy ways to transform product returns from a pure loss to a source of revenue. But they have the vision and talent to become the leading customer experience SaaS and a driving force for modern retail. They are in the business of making customer obsession a turnkey solution accessible to all.” says Jonathan Userovici, General Partner at Headline.