NA-KD announces a 45 million USD B-round to speed up global expansion

London - Swedish fashion e-commerce company NA-KD is launching a 45 million USD in B-round funding series to help accelerate its global expansion.

The new funding round is led by Partech, a global tech investment firm with several e-commerce success, such as UK-based Made.com and ManoMano within its portfolio, together with NA-KD existing investors Northzone, eEquity, Jonas Norland, Filip Engelbert (Avito founders) and US-based FJ Labs. NA-KD aims to use the new 40 million USD primary funding to speed up the company's ongoing growth and strengthen its position as one of the leading fashion brands online for millennials.

"The capital injection is growth capital and will primarily be used to improve the customer proposition and experience, offer a broader inventory and intensified international marketing activities," commented NA-KD´s executive chairman, Magnus Emilson. "Today the company employs 138 people and with the Series B investment, the company will look to further strengthen all departments with high performing talents."

The Swedish e-commerce company will use the funding to launch 9 localised websites over the next few months, hire international talent and continue to develop collaborative collections with worldwide influencers. Founded in 2015 by serial entrepreneur Jarno Vanhatapio, NA-KD has rapidly grown into one of the most desirable online fashion brands in Sweden and Germany. Following the funding round NA-KD has also set its sights on growing in the UK.

"UK is obviously a very interesting market and one of our best trending markets in terms of sales and brand interest," said Vanhatapio to FashionUnited. "We already now have many new age fashion icons in our fanbase of 75.000+ followers from the UK. So we have started to localize the setup for us to be agile enough to compete on the tough UK fashion and online fashion scene. Concrete that means that we are refining our local payment methods and are adding local last mile heroes, as well as increasing our base of brand ambassadors. So 2018 UK will be among our top ten markets in terms of investments, but it is all about getting the proposition in place before we scale."

Since its launch back in 2015, NA-KD has continued to grow, increasing 150 percent in 2017, reporting revenues of 75 million US dollars compared in 2016. "We have had great interest from the investment community and we were in the fortunate position to be able to choose who to partner up with," continued Vanhatapio. "I am happy to welcome Partech into the NA-KD team. Partech really impressed us with their high ambitions, deep domain knowledge, extensive omnichannel expertise among the partners and their impressive investment portfolio."

"In Q1 2017 we moved our main distribution centre to the Netherlands and in Q4 2017 we launched our new website and IT platform. Executing two massive projects in the same year and delivering growth of 153 percent YoY proves that we have a stellar team at NA-KD," continued Vanhatapio. "We will continue to invest in growth during 2018, especially targeting the US, UK and major European markets with nine localised and translated sites and with localised marketing."