Rome, 22 September 2020 - CDP Venture Capital SGR - Fondo Nazionale Innovazione invests 3.5 million euro in the company BrandOn Group, marketplace expert enabler, through the Italy Venture I Fund - already a 9.1% shareholder since 2018 with a 1 million euro investment - and the Italy Venture II Fund. The round, which amounts to approximately 5 million euro, sees CDP Venture Capital SGR as lead investor, in co-investment with Primomiglio and Vulcano, which are already shareholders of the company.

The aims of the transaction are to aid the company’s development, including through new acquisitions, and strengthen its positioning as one of the leading technological partners for online sales in the European market, with the aim of providing support, at this time of COVID-19 emergency, to Italian SMEs wishing to develop sales through digital channels and international marketplaces.

The new round of funding will also strengthen the organisational structure of the company’s Naples office.

BrandOn Group, founded by Paola Marzario in 2012 and based in Milan and Naples, is today the digital company that sells the products and brands of Italian and European groups on the main international marketplaces.

“Multichannel and digitisation are prerogatives that the COVID-19 emergency has made even more urgent and fundamental for Italian businesses”, comments Enrico Resmini, Chief Executive Officer and General Manager of CDP Venture Capital SGR - Fondo Nazionale Innovazione. “The transaction aims to accelerate the development of the internationalisation processes of Italian businesses, through the expertise and technologies deployed by BrandOn Group as a partner for the management of online sales through digital channels.”

BrandOn Group recorded a turnover of 21 million euro in 2019, up 130% on 2018, and achieved EBITDA of around one million euro and a net profit in positive territory for the first time.

Despite Covid, the company has been able to seize the growth opportunities of the digital channel, reaching a turnover of 15 million euro in the first half of 2020, up 85% compared to the first half of the previous year.

The BrandOn Group offered over one million references compared to 370 thousand in 2018, for a total of 1.2 million products sold in 2019, on over 50 e-commerce platforms, in 35 countries, both in the EU and in Eastern Europe, as well as in the Middle East.

“We are flattered that CDP Venture Capital SGR has chosen our company as a partner to support Italian businesses in the process towards a necessary digitisation. At such a delicate time for our country’s entrepreneurial fabric, it’s therefore crucial to enable SMEs in the process of acquiring all the necessary tools for the digital acceleration of their sales channels”, commented Paola Marzario, founder and President of BrandOn Group. “With the entry of new capital, we will be able to strengthen the organisational structure of the company's Naples office, hiring sales and IT professionals. This is an important signal for the entire digital retail sector, which – especially in recent months – has played a strategic role for several businesses that have seen their traditional sales channels blocked”.

BrandOn Group is a marketplace expert that provides businesses with a management service for the entire online sales and after-sales process: from the digitisation of catalogues to the SEO description of products, from the definition of the online sales strategy to logistics, from dynamic pricing to feed management and big data analysis, from customer care to returns and after-sales management.