(The Next Web) (2 April 2013) A little over a month after Linio announced a whopping $26.5m funding round from Summit Partners, Rocket Internet‘s Latin American Amazon clone has unveiled yet another chunky investment.
This time round, Linio has nabbed €25m ($32m USD) from the Santo Domingo Group, half of which will come from Valorem, which is an Anonymous Society registered on Colombia’s Stock Exchange, managed under the philosophy of an “Investment Fund based in the creation of sustainable value for all of its stakeholders.” Founded in 1997, Valorem manages investment portfolios such as Caracol TV, Cine Colombia and Suppla, among others.
Linio was launched in spring 2012 and already has operations in Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela, selling just about everything you could imagine (a la Amazon). But this latest round will be used to grow the Amazon-clone specifically in Colombia.
“We are excited to welcome Santo Domingo Group as our main partner and investor in Colombia. Both organizations share the same aspirations for ecommerce in Colombia, and we are now destined to build the most customer centric retail company in the country,” says Vagn Knudsen, General Manager at Linio Colombia.
“This investment, which comes on the heels of a previous investment in Linio by Tengelmann , JP Morgan Asset Management, and Summit Partners, allows us to offer new categories of products, strengthen our operations, deliver even faster to our customers, and recruit the best talent,” he continues.
This latest round not only falls a little over a month after Summit’s investment, but also not long after Tengelmann ploughed ‘up to $20m’ in Linio too. This means that in less than two months, Linio has secured almost $80m – nothing to be sniffed at.