250.000 euro, financing for the flip.ro telephone trading platform

Mihaela Dumitrescu Posted on June 25, 2020• 4 min read

A Romanian website, through which users sell and buy used phones, received a new investment of 250,000 euros, 7 months after the launch of the startup.

Flip.ro received the round of venture capital financing from the GapMinder VC investment fund, with the participation of V7 Capital and a group of private investors. The Romanian online commerce platform also wants to expand internationally. "With this funding, we aim to double our targets for 2020" sayed George Moroianu, one of the founders of the company.

Flip.ro was also included in the Techcelerator business accelerator, which provides financing from the GapMinder fund. "Flip continued to grow steadily both during and after the Techcelerator acceleration program", sayed Cristian Dascalu, cofounder of Techcelerator and partner of GapMinder VC.

Also, Iulian Circiumaru, cofounder of V7 Capital, sayed: "We chose to invest in Flip again due to their ability to execute and adapt to market conditions, as we see in the coming years."

The website helps individuals sell their old phones and buy second-hand phones that have been checked and refurbished. In May 2020, Flip announced that more than 1,300 users had already purchased a phone through the platform, and that more than 250,000 euros had been paid to sellers who trade their phones on the platform. The platform claims that, on average, the price of second-hand phones sold on Flip.ro is 50% lower than the price of new phones.

All phones undergo a rigorous technical inspection and come with a warranty, so that users have an experience similar to buying a new phone - says the marketplace platform. According to the quoted source, in total, "over 800 users gave reviews about the Flip experience on: Google (320 reviews), Facebook (250 reviews) and their website (230 reviews), and the average rating is 4, 9 stars".

Flip.ro was opened in 2019 by Alin Luca (22 years old) and George Moroianu (25 years old). The two co-founders are not in the first business. Alin Luca also owns the company List IT SRL (trade in electronics), which in 2018 had a turnover of 283,000 RON and a profit of 78,000 RON.

George Moroianu owns, together with another associate, a cleaning company, Instahouse Sharing Solutions SRL (founded in 2017), which in 2018 had a turnover of 63,800 RON and a profit of 25,000 RON. In April 2020, a trade site with refurbished second-hand phones, Fenix.ro, was launched in Romania, opened by two French entrepreneurs based in Bucharest: Grégoire Vigroux and Adrien Arnoux. In Romania, however, the trade in second-hand phones seems to be dominated by informal direct or intermediated sales through marketplace platforms or ad sites, such as OLX.