Accel et al. invest €10m in Catawiki

Accel was joined in the round by Project A Ventures, former Booking.com CMO Arthur Kosten and Dutch entrepreneur Willem Sijthoff. The latter is an existing investor of Catawiki.

The deal marks Accel's first investment in the Netherlands.

Catawiki will use the fresh capital to expand throughout Europe. It currently operates in Belgium, Germany, France and the Netherlands.

The company also plans on almost doubling its current workforce and hopes to increase its number of auctioneers, of which it currently employs 42.

Company
Founded in 2008, Catawiki is headquartered in Assen with an additional office in Amsterdam. The company operates an online auction site that specialises in collectible and unique items. The company claims to pull in 3 million unique users per month.

All auctions begin on a Friday at noon CET, with the majority of lots starting at €1. Catawiki has 35 different auction categories overall, including comics, tribal art, cartography and natural history. Recently sold lots include first edition Tintin comics, Rembrandt etchings and dinosaur fossils.

The auctions are overseen by specialist auctioneers. The company currently employs 70 staff – 42 of whom are auctioneers – and has openings for 65 more jobs.

Catawiki was originally established as an online community for collectors. The founders began hosting weekly auctions in 2011.

People
CEO René Schoenmakers and CTO Marco Jansen are the founders of Catawiki. Michiel Kotting is a partner at Accel. Uwe Horstmann is a managing director at Project A.

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• Topics
• Expansion
• Benelux
• Consumer
• Netherlands