App commerce company Poq has secured USD4 million in a Series A funding round, led by venture and growth investor Beringea with additional funding from existing investors.
Seed investors include Seedcamp and Venrex. Poq provides a Software-as-a-Service platform that enables retailers to offer customer-facing shopping apps. Poq has coined the term ‘app commerce’ which refers to shopping via mobile apps.
Launched in 2011, Poq powers the apps of large international retailers such as House of Fraser, Missguided and Liberty. Poq allows retailers to make use of in-app and in-store data to gain actionable insights in customer behaviour and to identify the best growth opportunities.
The latest funding will be used to triple Poq’s development team, kick-start its international expansion outside of Europe and empower retailers to bring online shopping into the store.
The investment round closed as Poq signed two new clients, Holland & Barrett, a health retailer with over 1,000 stores globally, and etailer Made.com, which made GBP42.8 million in revenue last year.
Nitin Passi, the founder and chief executive of Missguided, says: “The revenue run-rate of the Missguided shopping app went from zero to GBP30 million within just four months of the app launch. The partnership with Poq has proven extremely valuable in a very short space of time, and the app now makes up 13 per cent of our online revenue. We look forward to leveraging the Poq platform while we expand our international and offline presences.”
Oyvind Henriksen, CEO and co-founder of Poq, says: “The app economy is the world’s fastest growing economy. Our platform is no exception, having already hit GBP100 million in app revenue and growing 600 per cent year-on-year. Our mission is to drive more revenue through our platform than previous-generation web-based commerce platforms, through more advanced native app technology. Apps provide the best shopping experience on mobile, where customers are logged in forever and can pay with a fingerprint, and retailers who don’t offer apps will lose out to those who do. We are really excited about closing this funding round and continuing to lead the app commerce revolution.”
Rob Hodgkinson, investment director at Beringea, says: “At Beringea, we are experienced in working with ecommerce businesses and we love that Poq’s offering is helping many mainstream retailers create shopping apps to complement their main ecommerce sites and bridge the gap between online and in-store.
“The true value for retailers in working with Poq is not just that they can quickly build well designed, functional shopping apps that unify brand experience, but the data that they gain from having customers logged into the app. Poq also rolls out new code each week, so their clients’ apps are never out of date. Other retail apps are often eight or nine months in the making and already out of date by the time they get to market.”
