The Australian Catch of the Day from the Leibovich brothers has announced their first big financing round. Internally, employees were informed about it on Thursday ("It's a big deal"):
"We have some very significant news.
An investment consortium of Tiger Global management (Investors in Facebook, Zynga and LinkedIn), James Packer’s Consolidated Press Holdings, Andrew Bassat from SEEK and Glenn Poswell from Gannet Capital have just acquired a minority stake in our business and become our partners.
The deal values our company at $200 million, making it the largest investment in the Australian ecommerce sector to date. We should all be very proud of what we have achieved."
The valuation of Catch of the Day significantly exceeds that of Woot! when they were sold to Amazon in 2010. On a side note, the Catch of the Day sister site Scoopon is also making headlines regarding their legal troubles with Groupon.
Catch of the Day is targeting 2011 revenues of $120 million (AUS). Plans are to launch two other specialty sites - Brandstreet for fashion and Grocery Run, based on their popular grocery service.
Exciting Commerce has reported on Grocery Run a number of times already on our German blog. Currently COTD is running Grocery Run campaigns twice a month. Here is a fascinating video report which includes an insider peek into the Grocery Run operations.
"The Grocery Run comes around twice a month. On the day we will list up to 150 different products on the first day and we will add another 50 the next day. We can basically sell up to 8.500 products an hour when the sale goes live."
This is what Catch of the Day looked like in its early days. What a difference to its current site:
It was unfortunate that Catch of the Day was not able to participate at the Live Shopping Days 2011 conference as was originally foreseen.
Congratulations to the COTD team who are continuing to demonstrate how exciting and varied e-commerce can be. You’ve shown that you don’t need a huge American or European market to take a good idea and execute it successfully.
For orientation purposes: the Australian market has only 22 million residents.
Related posts:
- Catch of the Day Plans to Grow from $60 Million to $100 Million
- Scoopon: Catch of the Day Not Resting On Their Laurels
- Catch of the Day on its Live Shopping Year in Australia
Originally posted in German as two posts (1, 2) by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.
Comments