Italian Angels for Growth led the round in partnership with the Doorway platform and other angel networks. CDP Venture Capital Sgr – Fondo Nazionale Innovazione and other current Qapla’ shareholders took part in the financing round in order to strengthen Qapla’s Italian business leadership and foster its European expansion. Qapla’ was accelerated in Nana Bianca and recorded rapid growth thanks to its innovative shipment management system.
Qapla’ - an integrated, innovative platform that enables B2C eCommerces to manage shipments in all their steps - announces a new financing round for 950 thousand euros. Track2Marketing (the vehicle company aggregating the Italian Angels for Growth, Doorway e Moffulabs shareholders), CDP Venture Capital SGR via Fondo Acceleratori, and other Qapla’ shareholders including Club Acceleratori and previous Mamacrowd crowdfunders, subscribe the funding round aimed to foster Qapla’s leadership in the Italian market, speed-up its growth in the Spanish market, and enter new European markets starting from France, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Qapla’ was founded in 2014 by Luca Cassia and Roberto Fumarola and was accelerated by Nana Bianca in Florence. Its integrated platform allows B2C eCommerces to simultaneously manage shipment tracking as well as customer care and marketing automation activities: from label printing to delivery notification. The monitoring service ensures Customer Care control across all shipment carriers and provides accurate delivery communications via e-mail or SMS through a real-time notification and tracking system. The platform already allowed many eCommerces to optimise time, resources, and to maximise customer satisfaction in the crucial stage of delivery. Furthermore, Qapla’ provides B2C eCommerces with powerful marketing and retention opportunities, thanks to the most advanced editor on the market for easily customising delivery notifications. These messages may contain offers, purchase recommendations, and other call-to-action during a phase that gets the consumer’s maximum attention.
Qapla’ platform is a B2B SaaS (Software As A Service) whereby every customer spends a number of credits according to the chosen service: the credits package could be prepaid or post-paid at the end of the month.
The financing round was overseen by Lucia Occhiuto and Davide De Maio as Legal Advisors and by Giuseppe Arturo as Financial Advisor. After this collaboration, Giuseppe Arturo accepted to join Qapla’ as CFO.
Roberto Fumarola, Qapla’ co-founder and CEO, said: “The trust that important realities such as CDP Venture Capital SGR and Italian Angels for Growth have placed in our project makes us proud and even more motivated to continue on our growth path inside the eCommerce industry, a market that keeps growing and shows considerable development margins in Italy and worldwide. Thanks to this funding we’re able to take a first step towards internationalisation: we’ll go beyond those markets where we already operate, starting from the United Kingdom, Germany, and France and we’ll strengthen our presence in Italy and Spain. We are reinforcing our team with key profiles, with our COO Ludovica Cantarelli and CFO Giuseppe Arturo both already operating. We’re still looking for a CSO (Chief Sales Officer), to complete our executive team for this phase. We’re expanding the Italian and the Spanish sales departments and we are recruiting for the customer support/onboarding and customer success teams as well. Furthermore, we’ll accelerate new functionality development to make shipment management even easier by placing tracking at the center of eCommerce marketing strategies.”
Stefano Molino, head of Fondo Acceleratori of CDP Venture Capital SGR said: “We’re extremely glad for the conclusion of the operation with Qapla’, with the business accelerator partner Nana Bianca. This process is included in the AccelerORA! program strategy by our Fondo Acceleratori, focused on supporting the most innovative Italian realities, with particular attention to those sectors which underwent fast changes because of the Covid-19 emergency. The consumer habits evolution, together with the eCommerce industry growth, make Qapla’ a strategic company with its solutions for shipments’ tracking, customer care and marketing.”
Andrea Giustina and Gianluca D’Agostino, “champions” for IAG and all the other associated shareholders of Track2Marketing srl, said: “Qapla’ is an excellent platform that solves a critical problem and creates added value for all players in the B2C eCommerce ecosystem: Merchants, Carriers, and Consumers. We detected a best-in-class customer satisfaction and confirmed Qapla’s huge growth potential, which will be accelerated thanks to the financial resources now available to the Founders.”
Barbara Avalle, COO of Doorway, said: “Qapla’ proved to be a success story, convincing many of our investors. Closing the crowdfunding campaign in advance, with an important investor who covers more than half of the round, demonstrates that the project value was fully recognised by our community, confirming the great validation work we do on our startups and SMEs to propose a diversified Portfolio of rapidly scaleable companies.”
In Q1 2020, Qapla’ exceeded 1 million monthly shipments tracked, perfectly managed thanks to its integrated platform that controls 3 critical aspects of the eCommerce business at the same time: Shipping, Customer Care, and Marketing. Thanks to Qapla’s services, all consumer communications are 100% customisable providing options to add useful information about catalog news, discounts, similar product recommendations, events, special openings, focused messages that simplify customer relations and brand awareness, together with tracking info.