AGI – “My name is Simon Beckerman, but despite the English name I was born and raised in Italy, and I founded an app called Depop in Treviso”. In one of his rare public appearances in Italy, the founder of Depop, a startup purchased by the American ecommerce giant Etsy for $ 1.63 billion, presented himself at the 2019 Startupitalia Open Summit. Depop is a fashion marketplace designed for the new generations to buy and sell through the app.
After the foundation in 2011 in the H-Farm startup incubator in Roncade, the company moved to the United Kingdom, in London, launched new offices in Manchester, Los Angeles, New York, Milan and Sydney. Today it has about 400 employees worldwide and according to the data provided by the company in 2020 it saw its business explode, reaching about 30 million users.
A product is loaded on the app every three seconds and in the year of the pandemic alone it saw a billion articles transact on its platform. Depop is the biggest exit ever made by an Italian startup, and it is the second unicorn in the history of the Italian digital economy after Yoox, another online fashion giant born twelve years earlier.
Depop, as its founder explained at the time, moved to London because on the one hand there was no technical know-how in Italy at the time to create a functional application for the type of product conceived, on the other because there was no capital market here. such as to allow the company to raise funds on the market to grow. London provided the company with the lymph it needed to scale its target market.
Crunchbase, the most authoritative observatory in the world on the venture capital market, attributes 11 investment rounds to Depop, for a total of 105.6 million dollars.
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