Why we are investing in Vivino

We are delighted to announce that Creandum Fund is investing in the Copenhagen-based social wine service Vivino. The Vivino app allows users to easily remember and rate the wines that they drink. Vivino automatically recognizes labels and matches them to their extensive wine database of nearly 500,000 wines. Users can then remember their favorite wines, read wine reviews, and follow other people's Vivino activity to discover new wines. Vivino is the world's best tool for wine drinkers (amateurs and connoisseurs alike) and as a result has become the fastest growing wine app in the US and globally. We believe this provides a platform for Vivino to revolutionize wine eCommerce on a global scale.

Vivino has all the characteristics of a great investment and we are therefore very proud to back Heini Zachariassen, Theis Søndergaard, and the rest of the Vivino team. They have developed a product that consumers are adopting at an increasing pace. In November, Vivino was downloaded almost 100,000 times and user engagement reached an all time high with the average active user scanning 6.5 wine labels per month. Vivino has been the #1 most downloaded app in the food and drink category in 11 countries (incl. Brazil). In addition, the wine market is very attractive with a total size of USD 125 billion that is well suited for online retail. Most importantly Vivino has an exceptional team lead by Heini Zachariassen who previously had success building Bullguard from 3 to 100 employees. We look forward to working with Heini on making Vivino the largest global player in wine ecommerce.

Online wine retail is already between 4% and 8% of the global wine market and Vivino will make it even easier to buy wine online. Imagine that you're at a restaurant and you taste a fantastic new wine. You scan the label, rate it 5 stars, share it with your friends, and then you see that the wine can be bought at a great price in an online wine store. You click the buy button and order a case of 6 bottles, which arrives at your doorstep the next day. We believe that this type of innovation will help wine eCommerce grow even further.

Vivino can become a sales generator for its affiliate partners and we believe that this part of the eCommerce value chain holds a lot of potential. The retail part of the value chain is becoming increasingly saturated thus increasing pressures on margins and commoditizing more and more market segments. This makes it particularly difficult for etailers with small home markets (e.g. the Nordics) to become large global players. However, Nordic companies with successful affiliate offerings have the potential to become a global success - JustEat being the most recent example. Stay tuned on this blog for more insight on the Nordic eCommerce ecosystem.

Creandum Funds have a history of investing in successful Nordic ventures such as Spotify, iZettle, and Wrapp. Vivino is Creandum's first Danish investment in the third fund, which we are actively investing from. Martin Hauge, General Partner at Creandum, will join Vivino's board.