Infrastructure for the Circular Economy: Our Investment in Hammoq
Ty Blunt would endlessly scour online marketplaces, stores, and estate and garage sales for hidden gems – Nintendo games, antiques, arbitrage products – anything he thought could fetch a decent premium. He quickly grew his reseller business to almost $2M a year in revenue, living out of the warehouse that held his inventory. But as he scaled, the administrative burden of running his business – listing and delisting products across multiple marketplaces, managing inventory, transportation logistics, and more – ate up time and energy that Ty needed to spend scouring for new products. He recognized that he, and the one million other power resellers like him, needed better software tools to run their businesses. He co-founded Hammoq with CEO and co-founder Siddharth Lunawat to reduce the administrative burden on resellers, and let them focus on what they do best. Today, Hammoq announced a $3M Seed financing round led by Origin Ventures.
The circular economy, a historically “hidden” market, is booming. With the recent successful public debuts for companies like Poshmark and ThredUp, and the acquisition of Depop by Etsy for $1.6B, the resale economy is expected to grow 39% annually from 2019 to 2024:
From Thredup’s 2021 Resale Report
While the e-commerce sector has no shortage of services and software serving it, the reseller economy has been historically neglected. Serious resellers lack the technology tools to run their businesses: starting with an urgent need to quickly list inventory across multiple platforms.
Hammoq has built a powerful technology platform that automates listing work across as many websites as a seller wants using just a few pictures and basic information. Planned product features include financing, sourcing, logistics, marketing, accounting, and more.
The Origin Ventures team spoke with several resellers as we learned about Hammoq. These “SMBs” are entrepreneurial: from the couple that buys shoes by the pound for cataloging and reselling, to couples traveling the country engaging in “retail arbitrage” from an RV, or the person salvaging collectibles and other interesting items from garage and estate sales to plug into homes. Hammoq’s opportunity is to build for the circular economy the “picks and shovels” that Shopify has built for the direct e-commerce industry.
Origin Ventures has studied the asset-light, rent-focused preferences of Digital Native consumers for a long time, and this is our second investment along that theme – following our recent Series A investment in Vivrelle. Like Origin Ventures’ investments in Tock, BacklotCars, and others, Hammoq includes a co-founder who has experienced the problem firsthand and has credibility in the marketplace.
We are excited to lead Hammoq’s $3M Seed financing alongside Sierra Ventures, SaaS Ventures, Silicon Road, and strategic angel investors.
