Amazon Brand Owner Heyday Raises $555 Million in Funding Round
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Heyday, a platform that buys and builds consumer brands that sell on Amazon.com Inc., raised $555 million in a funding round led by Raine Group and Indian tycoon Azim Premji’s investment firm.
Existing investors including General Catalyst, Victory Park Capital and Khosla Ventures also participated in the Series C financing, Heyday said in a statement Nov. 16.
Heyday is valued at more than $1 billion after the deal, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
Heyday acquires consumer-goods companies that sell products on Amazon and aims to improve their design, production and marketing. It also has started its own brands.
Thrasio Holdings Inc., another so-called brand aggregator, raised $1 billion in a funding round led by Silver Lake last month. Thrasio was valued at more than $5 billion in that fundraising, Bloomberg News reported.
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Heyday co-founder and CEO Sebastian Rymarz said that in addition to helping brands make their businesses more professional, Heyday offers platforms for brands to sell products directly to consumers or establish a brick-and-mortar presence.
“We’re acquiring and we’re also incubating brands that are marketplace native,” Rymarz said, adding that the company is partnering with celebrities to launch new products.
“What we’re doing is trying to help them make what we’re calling ‘the great leap’ from Amazon to household brand,” he said.
Founded in 2020, San Francisco-based Heyday raised $70 million in a series B funding round in May. It also has offices in China, India and the Philippines.
Alongside the funding round, Heyday announced the appointment of three executives to fuel international expansion. Navid Veiseh, a former executive at Amazon and Korean e-commerce site Coupang Inc., was hired as chief financial officer, while Reema Batta was named chief marketing officer and Todd Heeter became chief accounting officer.
The new funding will allow the company to buy new brands, invest in the team that creates new brands and pursue international expansion, said Mark Crane, a partner at General Catalyst who also is a Heyday board member.
“It gives us that time to ultimately be able to expand and think very thoughtfully about how we’re going to go into other geographies,” Crane said.
Amazon ranks No. 22 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of private carriers in North America.
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