Online retail giant Catch of the Day and its group buying subsidiary Scoopon have scored an $80 million investment from a group of buyers including James Packer’s Consolidated Press Holdings, Seek co-founder Andrew Bassat and American hedge fund Tiger Global.
The move not only highlights the resurgence in tech investments sweeping the globe, (underlined in part by LinkedIn’s successful float last Friday), but also a revival in the Australian tech scene and online retailing in general.
The investment, which values the group at $200 million, also shows how popular the group buying space has become for media and investment firms, with Scoopon being the last major group buying site in Australia to receive funding. Spreets, Jump On It and Cudo were either provided funding or launched by media companies.
And this is only the most recent of several digital investments led by media companies and buyers including Nine, Deals Direct and a number of international venture capital firms.
“We’ve established ourselves as leaders in this space without any money and we’ve been profitable. They’ve given us a full suitcase full of cash, and we’re going to use it to become the undisputed market leader,” co-founder Gabby Leibovich told SmartCompany.
The consortium of investors includes Tiger Global, Consolidated Press Holdings, Andrew Bassat and Gannet Capital head Glen Poswell. The investment marks the second online retail-related venture for Packer, who pumped millions into Deals Direct last month through his Ellerston Capital firm.
Gabby and Hezi Leibovich will own a controlling stake in the business, but Tiger’s Lee Fixel and Seek’s Jason Lenga will join the board.
Currently Catch of the Day, which incorporates the Scoopon group-buying site, is turning over about $100 million and is five years old. No doubt the group of investors would be eager for its traffic and database – it has 150,000 visitors a day and hundreds of thousands of names on their email lists.
Investors say they were attracted to the company’s scope and the founders’ knowledge of the current retail environment.
“What was immediately apparent when we started discussions with the Leibovich brothers was their deep understand of the space and what was required to build a globally competitive eCommerce group,” Fixel said in a statement.
James Packer also added that “unlike many other players in the market”, Catch of the Day is able to turn a profit due to the right skills, supplier networks and “economies of scale”.
Catch of the Day wants to expand its current grocery offering into a new site called groceryrun.com.au, designed to challenge the major supermarkets. Currently it sells groceries every so often on the Catch of the Day site, and Leibovich says this has been a success.
“We’ve been playing around with groceries for the last month or so, and now we’re going to launch a site. We can see huge potential there.”
“And we are also going to launch a fashion apparel site called BrandStreet.com.au, and we think there is certainly growth there.”
But the investment also brings with it some legal troubles. Scoopon is currently being sued by Groupon for registering the Groupon trademark and Groupon.com.au URL, and a case is set to be heard in the Melbourne Federal Court in August.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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