Elevate Brands invests $250 million to acquire third-party Amazon sellers

Elevate Brands, a New York and Austin-based startup that acquires and operates third-party Amazon merchants, has secured $250 million in funding, which it will use to continue investing in its technology and to acquire more small businesses.

Elevate's CEO said that Elevate is already profitable and currently has 25 brands in a stable state, many of which have patents for multiple products.

It estimates that there are about 5 million third-party sellers on Amazon today , with about 1 million joining the platform in 2020 alone. Thrasio, one of Elevate’s larger aggregator competitors, believes that about 50,000 of those companies generate $1 million or more in sales per year. Elevate estimates that the Amazon market, currently valued at $300 billion, will double in the next five years.

Unsurprisingly, all this has led to many companies like Elevate amassing hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and equity to assemble the most promising of these businesses.

The reason they give is that the founders and management of these third-party sellers may lack interest in running the business long-term, or they may lack the funds to expand to the next level . Therefore, integrating these businesses to leverage technology investments for better market analysis, marketing, manufacturing, and supply chain is a logical solution.

As one of Amazon’s millions of third-party sellers , Elevate began selling in late 2016 , testing the waters by selling some private-label products, which gave the company an early understanding of how to handle the supply chain in manufacturing and consider how to differentiate its products from similar products that sold alongside them on Amazon. By 2017, Elevate was managing about 8,000 SKUs under that model.

Elevate is not currently focused on any particular product category like other aggregation companies, with the priority being intellectual property .

When a product performs well on Amazon, there will be a lot of excellent data, which will create a large number of imitators . Elevate said that finding businesses that can maintain their competitive position, adding new variations and bringing them to other markets are all important for community building.

Elevate Brands

Acquisition

Amazon