Seed9 November 2020

Purple Dot raises £1.4m in a seed round led by Connect Ventures to expand its retail payment platform

Connect Ventures led the seed round for the fashion fintech startup.

£1.4MSeed

Purple Dot provides an e-commerce pre-order and waitlist platform that allows brands to sell products before they arrive at warehouses. Its software helps retailers manage inventory risks and reduce unsold stock.

Purple Dot has secured £1.4m in seed funding led by Connect Ventures, with participation from AI Seed, Moxxie Ventures, and several angel investors. The company provides a payment plug-in designed to help fashion brands tackle unsold inventory and protect profit margins by offering a worth-the-wait purchasing model.

Founded by former Skyscanner employees Madeline Parra and John Talbott, the fintech startup will use the new capital to expand its operations and scale its software offering for retailers. The platform provides an alternative to buy now, pay later schemes by encouraging considered purchases rather than consumer debt.

From the founder

"When shopping online today, customers can either pay the retail price or walk away. When they do walk away, the item goes through the discounting process, becomes unprofitable for the merchant and is resigned to landfill. This binary system isn’t working for anyone – the customer loses out on the item, because it may go out of stock in their size before they attempt to purchase it again, and the merchant loses the sale. Purple Dot tackles this problem head on by providing a new way to shop, taking on unsustainable, unrelenting consumerism, poor pricing tactics and profit-crunching sales at the same time."

Madeline Parra

CEO and Co-Founder at Purple Dot

Investor perspective

"For Connect Ventures our investment in Purple Dot extends our thesis of investing in teams who leverage software and a product-first approach to solving real-world problems. Purple Dot’s innovative proposition benefits retailers by creating a solution to their inventory problems. End of season ‘panic sales’ have long caused financial uncertainty for retailers and a negative impact on the environment in equal measure. We’re very proud to have partnered with Madeline and John in their mission to change the way we shop and to rewrite the rules of retail."