Home Articles eBev raises $1.5 million to tackle Australia’s $5 billion wholesale beverage market

eBev raises $1.5 million to tackle Australia’s $5 billion wholesale beverage market

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Australian B2B beverage start-up, eBev, has announced a raise of $1.5 million as it prepares a national roll out of its technology platform to tackle Australia’s $5 billion wholesale beverage market.

A total of $220,000 was raised through angel investment in a recent round led by the Sydney Angels group, which included capital from the Sydney Angels Sidecar Fund. Further capital raised through private investors took the total amount raised to $1.5 million.

eBev has built a search and ordering tool that allows businesses such as restaurants, hotels, bars and independent retailers to order all their beverages from one platform. It can assist venues by cutting their sourcing, inventory management and ordering time, as well as providing analytics on how products are performing in real time.

With a current database of over 20,000 wines – the largest in Australia – eBev is providing a one-stop, centralised, and mobile platform for Australia’s 38,000 licensed venues to source, purchase and manage their stock. Currently over 700 venues in Sydney have signed up to the platform with over 16,000 cases ordered and $2.4 million worth of transactions already achieved.

Sydney Angels investor and syndicate lead, Adrian Bunter, has joined the Board of eBev and said that the market potential in the wholesale beverage sector is clear.

“The wholesale beverage industry offers huge potential to investors and is currently largely untapped by innovation. It was great to see eBev already on the front foot in tackling the problems long-suffered by venues in the ordering and management of stock.

“Sydney Angels members were impressed by the clear benefits that eBev brings to both the venues and suppliers within the wholesale beverage industry. The fact that eBev has already signed on hundreds of Sydney’s licensed venues with solid transactions in motion is testament to its need in the market,” added Mr Bunter.

What will eBev use this funding for?

Proceeds from the capital raising will allow eBev to expand the product offering and scale nationally. Current establishments already signed up to eBev include Garfish, Bathers Pavilion, The Tilbury, Rag and Famish.

eBev General Manager, Cassandra MacDonald, said the funds raised will allow eBev to build out its service offering to include all beverage types, sales rep tools and payments.

“Our technology offers efficiencies to make it easier for licensed venues to find beverages and their suppliers, to contact them, order and pay from what is a highly fragmented market place. We’re thrilled that Sydney Angels has supported us and strengthened our position to grow that community and extend our offering across Australia. Our target is to have national reach across all beverages by the end of FY17.

“Traditionally, weekly beverage ordering is a fragmented, slow, inefficient and a frustrating process for venues – and almost equally so for the vendors. Often a venue has to reduce its supplier options due to the administrative costs that comes with having lots of providers, with eBev, a venue can now have more choice as well as more efficiency.

“We are fiercely independent and respect the key role of industry participants including distributors and sales reps,” added Ms MacDonald.

The eBev team: Richard Barlow, Nathaniel Kammer, Cassandra MacDonald, David Saliba, Jason Deacon, Oscar Videan
The eBev team: (L-R) Richard Barlow, Nathaniel Kammer, Cassandra MacDonald, David Saliba, Jason Deacon, Oscar Videan

What exactly does eBev do?

Benefits for the venues:

  • Often venues have limited time but want different and interesting beverages, the buyer is also committed to front of house responsibilities, like service hours, so they need to source and manage their weekly beverage stocktakes and orders whenever they can.
  • eBev is assisting venues by cutting their sourcing, inventory management and ordering time, as well as providing analytics on how products are performing in real time.
  • eBev allows venues to connect to multiple suppliers efficiently rather than them potentially having to reduce the number of suppliers they deal with due to the traditional admin involved to maintain the business partnership.

Benefits for the suppliers:

  • There are significantly high costs of selling products, portfolios are often quickly out of date due to vintage changes and limited stock and weekly orders come from multiple Buyers in various formats and at irregular hours
  • eBev is assisting suppliers by offering simple industry specific CRM sales tools and reports, branded digital versions of portfolios kept up to date in the cloud and standardised purchase orders from multiple Buyers allowing for quick and easy confirmations

Who are the people behind eBev?

eBev was launched in June 2015 by Dan Stinton and Cassandra MacDonald, who came together in frustration due to inefficiencies in the hospitality industry to which they both belonged. Stinton is a qualified sommelier and also has a strong background in digital media. He went on to drive eBev through its pre-launch/beta phase, where the focus was on the digital business model. Stinton exited eBev and Cassandra now drives the scale of the start-up, with eight years industry knowledge in the wholesale beverage market behind her.

“Coming from hospitality backgrounds, we understood the inefficiencies in the industry first hand; how venues are time poor but want the best wines; how the supplier landscape is competitive, and in some cases saturated; and how highly fragmented the marketplace is,” she told Anthill. “We saw an opportunity to create a win-win for everyone – suppliers and venues – and the concept of eBev was established.”