Volition Press: It is great to meet you Ian and congratulations on the funding round! How would you describe Levanta, and what is the company’s founding story?
Ian Brodie: Absolutely. This is actually the Levanta founding team’s second affiliate marketing company together. We started our first company right at the beginning of the pandemic, Grovia, which was an affiliate recruitment software and services company. We grew Grovia to around 26 employees and then got an awesome acquisition offer from Acceleration Partners which we ended up taking. This deal was not only a big win for the founders but also the employees and investors as most of the employees at Grovia are still there. That’s how you can tell an acquisition actually went well – when the employees stay!
While we were working on Grovia post-acquisition, we really started to notice this important gap in the affiliate marketing ecosystem. Specifically, D2C companies for decades have had the ability to start their own affiliate programs, recruit their own content creators, publishers etc. as well as establish their own payout model. However, for Amazon sellers this was just not the case. Amazon does in fact run their own affiliate program, but it is not something that is made available to the actual individual seller. Amazon doesn’t enable the seller to go in and own those relationships, build direct agreements with the exact content creators that they want to work with, and set their own commissions. In short, Levanta was created to fill this gap and create the D2C affiliate experience for Amazon sellers.
VP: Would you say that Levanta found Product-Market-Fit early in the company’s journey?
IB: I would say that this was an immediate product-market-fit situation. We raised a small pre-seed round in November of 2022 and launched our first product in March of 2023 and things took off very quickly. We had sellers just loving our platform because it unlocked a new marketing channel for them. Levanta now enabled Amazon sellers to have the benefits of selling on a world-class platform like Amazon with the power of D2C affiliate programs they were used too. Importantly, Levanta has also proven to be a big beneficiary to Amazon as we of course are driving new traffic to Amazon.com. Specifically, we are on track to drive $286 million of Amazon sales over the next 12 months.
VP: Last week, Levanta announced a $20 million Series A led by Volition Capital. How do you plan on using the funds raised in this round to accelerate future growth?
We could not be more excited about this funding round led by Volition as we think there is so much opportunity in front of us. While we have only been around for about a year and a half, we are really starting to see Amazon sellers recognize the Levanta name. There are 60,000 Amazon sellers that meet our target ICP, and we have less than a thousand of them – so there is a huge opportunity within Amazon to continue to scale. We also have around 7,000 creators on the platform today, and there are quite literally millions of revenue generating content creators out there.
So this investment really unlocks our ability to go after these segments as well as invest in brand awareness, demand gen, going up market, and then continuing to invest in product. We have this amazing marketplace functionality that allows sellers and creators to find each other, collaborate on the platform, message each other, negotiate agreements, and send product samples. We want to continue to invest in that to make that more and more self-serve, more and more intelligent, help the matchmaking be a little bit smarter so that the right seller can find the right creator super-fast and they can get started on an ROI generating partnership right off the bat.
VP: Last question and then I will let you get back to focusing on preparation for Black Friday, why did you decide to work with Volition Capital as your capital partner?
IB: Totally. I have spoken to a lot of investors in the last year of my life, almost all of it inbound. I enjoy the company of very few of the investors and Volition was clearly one of them. Right off the bat, it was clear that the people at Volition are just good people. Volition’s priorities are not the same as your stereotypical investor. There is an attitude that I get from everyone I’ve talked to at Volition that they are humble, smart, and energetic which kept me coming back to Volition.
Also, simply put, I think Larry is the man, and I have a lot of respect for him. Investors always say they can bring a lot of value and often times founders doubt that. They think that they are more for relationships and opening doors and that is about it. But already, I’ve received some advice from Larry and the team that has actually helped in the day-to-day operations of the business. I can only imagine where our partnership will go from here now that we are off to the races!
VP: Thank you so much for the time Ian. Congratulations again.
IB: Thank you! Happy holidays.
