For its AI-powered second-hand shopping alternative to Amazon, Faircado picks €500K

With the participation from Earlybird, Peak Capital, Atomico, 4P Capital, and others, Faircado which offers the first AI-powered second-hand purchasing assistance, has secured €500K in a pre-seed round led by BackBone Ventures.

Berlin-based Faircado is addressing the required behavioral change in e-commerce, where consumption has found its new epicenter. Faircado intends to transform e-commerce into re-commerce by making used items the first choice for customers.

The German business will utilize the money to expand its product development and marketing efforts as well as to look into potential new European cooperation opportunities.

“In Europe, the number of new customers for used goods increased by 50% in a single year. Our goal is to eliminate global trash by converting from a linear to a circular economy and encouraging customers to buy used goods. With Faircado, you can buy used goods more easily and save hours searching through other resale sites. Evolena de Wilde d’Estmael, co-founder and CEO of Faircado, announced that in a few months, we will provide a few more shopping categories, including clothing, kid’s items, bikes, furniture, jewelry, and other items.

“The outstanding team behind founders Evolena and Ali is creating something that could turn e-commerce into a circular industry with exceptional technology and UX. We invested because it’s a real game-changer, according to 4P Capital Founding Partner Xavier Sarras.

Evoléna de Wilde d’Estmael and Ali Nezamolmaleki created Faircado in 2021. When Evoléna relocated to an unfurnished apartment in Berlin in 2020, the concept of Faircado was born. She spent several hours looking for used furniture and was utterly annoyed by the process. She realized that although Germany had roughly 70 separate second-hand markets, no aggregator could display all the items that were for sale.

She reportedly teamed up with her buddy Ali, a software engineer with 10 years of expertise, to launch Faircado, an AI-powered browser extension that acts as a second-hand buying assistant.

The team, which consists of six full-time workers from six different countries, strives for ideal gender equity at all levels of seniority.

Faircado is an Amazon substitute for used goods that functions as a browser extension to show customers the used goods available for the products they are looking to purchase online. The browser add-on collects all available used items into one place and compares their prices across a variety of categories, including electronics and books. When a user searches for a product on the marketplace, Faircado shows all available used options and connects the user with the resale shop.

This concept provides extra sales channels to second-hand shops while also lowering their customer acquisition costs. Additionally, it works with Everwave, and for each download of its extension, 1 kg of garbage is gathered from the world’s oceans. The brand will release a mobile app in 2023, and as of right now, the extension is compatible with Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

Image Credit: Faircado