Cloning race heating up

It looks like the cloning race has gotten amped up a notch in Europe.

After a timid German start with classic pre-seed announcements, noted in last week’s email, two Italians based in London announced securing funding of $65 million in debt and equity for building a business aggregating Amazon’s SKUs operators.

And just as the week was ending, some of the Germans rebounded and announced adding $25 million to the table (includes a credit line, which is important).

If you’re curious like me, you can read the announcement of one of their investors, which probably is copy/pasted from the investment memo.

It doesn’t say anything else than hope and wishful thinking. I truly wish we could see this type of investments in Europe more often, funding this kind of risks is what makes an investor to be different than a money manager.

But, realistically speaking, this is less of a conviction investment - the likely hedge to putting so much money in a pre-revenue, pre-product, pre-everything, is the fact that the founders just need to copy an already existing blueprint and they were previously employed by McKinsey and Rocket Internet. How badly can they screw it up, right?

Also, you may find handy to learn that Amazon has 65k 3rd party sellers and operates 100k EU marketplaces and some numbers to crunch if you’re into evaluating TAM.

Oh, and there’s also a great interview with the Thrasio CEO, the guy who had the vision, executed it and now is an inspiration for the entrepreneurs part of the Euro ecosystem that wants to compete with Silicon Valley.