Seed Funding: €4 million

In April 2021, Zefir raised €4 million from Stride.vc, Heartcore Capital, Kima Ventures, Alexander Chesterman and Shana Fisher. Faraday and Zefir’s partnership began at this point as they embarked upon an ambitious growth and hiring plan.

Establish Business Priorities and Objectives

Short-term goals included achieving a strong Series A with great investors on board and assembling an exceptional initial team to achieve longer-term milestones and attract other leading talent.  

Understand Culture and Dynamic

As is the case with many early stage companies Faraday advises, Zefir had a unique culture – valuing a hands-on and highly collaborative approach. In preparing for our searches, we built out the ways in which these new leaders would integrate into the existing group and incarnate Zefir’s values – being strategic, methodical and a team player.

Mapped Sequence for Collaboration

Having established the business’ priorities, we next worked with the founders to define the sequence through which we would collaborate and support them. 

The first step was to bring on board a seasoned but very entrepreneurially-minded Product leader. While the initial product was strong, the Product organisation was nascent and required vision and leadership. The hire needed to be a talent magnet as much as a product expert, embodying the business and acting as a thought leader in the French and European Tech scene.

Product

After an extensive mapping of the market, we secured Tony Hagnére. Having been the first product person at BackMarket and scaling it to a team of 40, Tony had the builder mentality and seniority Zefir was looking for, as well as the experience needed to refine a world-class product experience for customers. Importantly, Tony also aligned with Zefir’s culture and values. Hiring such a prominent figure in the product space went a long way in accelerating Zefir’s people growth and employer brand development.  

Business Operations

With a top-tier product leader secured, Zefir turned its focus to Operations to ensure the business could scale at the required pace. Being a fairly complex and ops-intensive company, Zefir was looking to hire a senior executive who had successfully led such scaling previously. Victor Schieber stood out – he had built a lot of the operational processes at ManoMano (also a marketplace model) from scratch and built part of the operations for Zalora in Asia. Combined with an entrepreneurial spirit and strong track record in recruiting and managing high-output teams, Victor was the perfect fit to build and oversee the execution of Zefir’s systems and processes. 

Growth

With a base of product and operations working to gear the business for scale in France and internationally, growth was the final piece of the jigsaw. This broad role needed to focus on visibility and the acquisition of users. This soon-to-be announced placement is one of the most experienced growth executives in Europe – with unique technical competency, a business mindset and proven track record building high-performing growth/revenue teams. Having led several verticals in one of France’s largest consumer tech companies, she was a stand-out candidate. 

Series A Funding: €20 million

In February 2022, Zefir raised €20 million from Sequoia, in addition to earlier investors Stride.vc, Heartcore Capital, Kima Ventures, Alexander Chesterman and Shana Fisher. Faraday also became an investor at this stage.