– Bzaar, a business-to-business cross-border marketplace, is connecting retailers with over 50 export-ready manufacturers in India.
– The U.S.-based company announced that it raised $4m in seed funding, led by Canaan Partners, and including angel investors Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, PhonePe founders Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari, Addition founder Lee Fixel and Helion Ventures co-founder Ashish Gupta.
– Nishant Verman and Prasanth Nair co-founded Bzaar in 2020 and consider their company to be like a “fair without borders,” Verman put it.

– ByondXR from Tel Aviv develops a platform that creates virtual showrooms and stores for beauty, fashion and home decor brands using extended reality.
– The company raised $7M in seed funding.
– The round was led by Firstime and OurCrowd, with participation from angel investor Peter Chu, founder and former CEO of XR platform HTC.
– The new investment will be aimed at expanding customer success and research and development.

– Creoate, a startup that lets independent retailers buy sustainable products from brands and wholesalers, has raised a $5m seed round.
– The round was led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from Vinted founder Justas Janauskas.
– Its competitors include traditional wholesalers that have supplied independent retailers for decades, and other startups such as Faire (U.S., raised $696 million) and Ankorstore (France, raised €115 million).
– Creoate says it helps retailers forecast which products will sell well so they can buy and manage inventory levels more easily.
– It says its cataloging software allows retailers to deal with fewer middlemen.
– Launched in January 2020, the platform now claims 25,000 retailers across the U.K., France and Netherlands.

– Urban Remedy from Point Richmond, CA offers certified organic ready-to-eat meals, snacks, and cold pressed juices.
– The company closed $18m Series D funding.
– The round was led by Manna Tree with participation from Builders Fund and Obvious Ventures.
– The new investment will be used to expand the company’s operations and support further manufacturing efficiencies and increased consumer awareness through digital marketing investments.

– Faire, the online wholesale marketplace connecting more than 200,000 retailers across North America and Europe with 20,000 brands from over 80 countries, announced the closing of $260 million in a Series F investment round led by Sequoia Capital.
– The funding, which includes all existing investors as well as new global investors Baillie Gifford and Wellington Management, values Faire at $7 billion, nearly tripling its previous valuation of $2.5 billion announced just over six months ago.
– This funding and vote of confidence from world-class investors comes just weeks after Faire’s expansion into Europe, which brings the platform’s powerful cross-border network effects to the $1 trillion European market.
– Across North America and Europe, independent retailers are doing more than twice the revenue of Walmart and Amazon combined.

– French startup Ankorstore has raised $102m funding.
– Tiger Global and Bain Capital Ventures are leading the funding round with existing investors Index Ventures, GFC, Alven and Aglaé also participating.
– The company is building a wholesale marketplace for independent shop owners.

– Leaf Trade closed its $5.5m Series A round led by Artemis Growth Partners with participation from Future Shape 1.5 and Hyde Park Angels.
– Total funding for Leaf Trade comes to $10m to date. This includes the conversion of the company’s earlier round and provides significant fresh capital to accelerate current growth in the company’s core 17 markets, as well as to expand into west coast markets while continuing to invest in their technology.
– Leaf Trade, a technology company whose platform facilitates wholesale ordering and fulfillment for cultivators and retailers, recently launched its integrated payments platform, Leaf Pay, which provides for seamless, end-to-end order processing and payment for all transactions.

– Cymbio raised a $7m Series A round led by Vertex Ventures.
– The company’s technology automates all drop ship and marketplace operations for brands with any retailer, including the complete set-up, integrations, onboarding and daily management of streamlined product data, imagery, mapping, taxonomy, inventory syncing, orders, billing, tracking, returns, reports and more.
– The funds will be used to expand Cymbio’s global footprint across R&D, sales and marketing.

– NuORDER is a B2B e-commerce platform based in Los Angeles.
– The company raised $45m in funding.
– The round was led by Brighton Park Capital and Imaginary Ventures.
– Natalie Massenet, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Imaginary Ventures and Founder of Net-A-Porter, will join as a board member and strategic partner driving European expansion and growth of the fashion and luxury retail markets.
– Managing Partner Mark Dzialga of Brighton Park Capital will also assume a seat on the board and contribute his expertise in helping companies execute against their global ambitions and within payments and marketplace.

– TradeCafe Inc. has secured a $10m equity investment from Round13 Capital.
– Concurrent with the investment, John Eckert, Round13 co-founder and Managing Partner, will be joining the TradeCafe board of directors.
– TradeCafe plans to use the funding to support the company’s global expansion, extend the reach of its technology to new markets, and enable ongoing research and development for its commodities trading platform.
– This investment brings the total funding raised to date to $43.5m.
– TradeCafe is a cloud-based technology platform and online marketplace for trading protein commodities.
– This global platform has been used to conduct, finance, and fulfill over $2bn in trade transactions to date, and provides value across the entire supply chain, from producer to processor to retailer – at zero cost.

– Abound, an online marketplace that helps independent retailers stock their shelves with new products from up-and-coming brands, is announcing that it has raised $22.9 million in its first institutional round of funding.
– The startup actually began as a community connecting manufacturer’s representatives and retailers, but Shope said the team “kept seeing the limits of that model,” while some retailers were asking to buy from the brands directly. So the team decided to support that experience, starting out by recruiting 50 brands with an offer of free consulting — as long as they were willing to be one of the brands on the marketplace when it launched in October 2019.