Less than a year and a half after its creation, Packitoo finalizes its first round of financing to allow it to continue its disruption of the packaging market.
This first round of financing of 500,000 euros is made with Adour Business Angels (ABA), Nouvelle Aquitaine Co-Investissement (NACO), BPI France and private investors.
Founded in July 2017 by Corinne Loustalet and Thomas Othax, Packitoo is the first collaborative platform dedicated to the development, purchase and sale of custom packaging. Packitoo's web application connects client companies' packaging projects to the best suppliers around the world. Through its digital services and human support, Packitoo ensures time savings, cost optimization and better collaboration between the packaging industry.
After 16 months of existence, Packitoo has a turnover of 120,000 euros, more than 250 client companies, 200 packaging suppliers and 10 employees (packaging experts, developers, data scientists, sales representatives, etc.) united around the same project and sharing the same ambitions: to enhance the value of the packaging industry by making it more accessible and therefore more efficient.
To achieve this goal, Packitoo's teams leverage hundreds of thousands of packaging industry data through their own machine learning algorithms to better assist client companies in outlining their technical projects, matching them to the right industrial capabilities, and also instantly predicting custom packaging prices to frame the client-supplier relationship from the start.
Packitoo's customers are startups and SMEs that consume packaging. An SME with a turnover between 2 and 10 millions buys between 50 000 and 1 000 000€ of packaging per year depending on the sector of activity. However, they do not necessarily have packaging specialists or buyers dedicated to complex products such as custom packaging. These are the actors for whom Packitoo has the greatest added value.
Packitoo's customers are packaging suppliers from all over the world, from the smallest SME to the largest group, eager to win new markets via the web as a complement to their traditional sales forces.
The packaging market is the 8th largest industry in the world and a sector estimated to be worth more than $1 trillion by 2020. On a national scale, French companies purchased nearly €30 billion worth of packaging in 2017 while the French packaging industry realized €23 billion that same year.
This first round of funding will allow Packitoo to continue the technological development of the predictive models used by the application and to accelerate its recruitment with the arrival in September of a marketing director and new data scientists.
"Packitoo has its roots in the paquito, a Basque collective dance where complete strangers dance together, carry each other and show solidarity. Packitoo aims to deploy all the necessary tools to recreate the link in this industry where the actors have a lot of trouble understanding each other. However, they must do so for obvious economic reasons, but perhaps more importantly, to develop tomorrow's responsible packaging together, for the good of our planet," says Thomas Othax, CEO of Packitoo.
