Packmatic, a Berlin-based digital packaging marketplace and one-stop shop for product companies seeking to optimise their packaging processes, has successfully raised €15 million in a Series A round led by EQT Ventures with participation from HV Capital, xDeck, and high-profile angel investors. The fresh capital will support Packmatic’s continued expansion in Europe, funding additional investment in software as well as the acquisition of top industry talent to help propel the business to its next stage of growth.
The packaging market, valued at €1 trillion globally1, is hard to navigate for both customers and suppliers due to high fragmentation of the supply side and a lack of digitalisation. The current sourcing process is not fit for purpose: customers lack price transparency and suffer from long and cumbersome processes. Packaging represents a major variable cost item to every product business, but buyers are forced to negotiate a complex industry where suppliers’ sales channels are often regional, manual, and outdated for this “made-to-order” industry. As a result, customers struggle to identify the best suppliers for their packaging needs and packaging often represents a highly unoptimized cost line with huge unrealized savings potentials. At the same time, suppliers struggle to obtain adequate visibility for their solutions and suffer from limited market reach. Put simply, customers are not buying from their best-fit suppliers.
To solve the dysfunction in the market, Packmatic has built a fully digital packaging one-stop shop - connecting businesses to a network of over 300 packaging suppliers across Europe in just a few clicks. The platform individually matches large FMCG brands and industrial companies as well as medium-sized product companies with high-quality, adapted and specialised packaging suppliers, and in many cases, opens the door to on average >15% cost savings for its customers and sustainable alternatives that are often difficult to access for many businesses. To this end, Packmatic’s platform offers a compelling solution from two key perspectives – providing cost and time savings to its customers via a streamlined, user-friendly sourcing platform, and supporting their wider environmental objectives by making sustainable alternatives more readily available.
Matthias Geiss, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Packmatic, commented: “The packaging market has long been overlooked and underserviced – packaging is integral to supply chains and yet the sourcing process is slow and disjointed, which is especially painful for SMEs.
“Packmatic’s data-driven platform delivers meaningful cost savings and efficiencies to customers, while helping them to meet their environmental goals. With demand for responsible packaging solutions rising rapidly as businesses race to decarbonise across every stage of the value chain, Packmatic is promoting industry change with a solution that is cost-effective, efficient, and helps companies to reduce their plastic and carbon footprint.”
Rania Belkahia, Partner at EQT Ventures added: “The European packaging market boasts an impressive valuation, but remains opaque, fragmented, and crucially, largely non-digital. Packmatic’s platform provides a unique solution– a cost-effective, fully digital marketplace championing the shift to low-carbon packaging.
“We’re excited to be partnering with founders Matthias, Jonas, and Paul, and believe Packmatic’s business fundamentals could not be better aligned with the current macro environment. With pricing pressures rising on companies in every industry and sustainability at the top of the global agenda, the company’s tech platform is perfectly poised to disrupt the market and become a category leader.”
1 Smithers