Tecnológica de Lagos wants to hire more than 100 people in Portugal and Spain – O Jornal Económico
“All brands need a hero.” It is under this motto that the Portuguese company of e-commerce Brandhero, who last year launched himself into the millionaire business of aggregators – companies that buy brands that sell products on Amazon to scale them – and in just one month raised his valuation to 50 million euros, by matching 5 million euros with business angels.
Brandhero’s roots are in the Algarve city of Lagos, where 14 of the current 40 workers work and where there will have to be space for more employees by the end of this year, as the goal is to hire 160 talents for Portugal and Spain (Madrid) in 2022. The capital will also be the target of investment, but it is still too early to put values on the table, according to Spanish entrepreneur Lucas Villanueva.
“We are going to open positions according to business needs. We plan to hire this year in the various business areas, including finance (M&A), corporate, marketing, human resources, supply chain / logistics, sales (business development), Technology (data, artificial intelligence), customer service and legal”, details Lucas Villanueva, co-founder and Head of Operations Director (COO), to Jornal Económico (JE).
“Lagos is the home of our operations headquarters. We are looking for a bigger space, a Silicon Valley-inspired headquarters in the heart of the Algarve. We also plan to open a space for co-working in Lisbon, so that we can bet on talent who do not have the opportunity to relocate in the south of the country”, said Lucas Villanueva, who manages the Iberian market. “The value will depend on the business and hiring needs”, says the Brandhero COO to JE.
The Lagos company is four months old and has four partners (Heini Zachariassen, who is CEO of Unicorn do e-commerce Vivino, Carsten Bang Jensen and Jesper Birch, who were involved in the exit of Outpost24 and Lucas Villanueva) and operates in the aggregator market, which continues to flourish. To get an idea, in 2021 alone, around 12 billion dollars (approximately 11 billion euros) were invested in companies in this area.
It’s as if Amazon were a business that creates business in there. That is, the Market it generates global investment opportunities (for the so-called aggregators) because 3,000 new brands appear per year on the platform that end up earning billions of dollars and are a target of interest.
For example, Brandhero does the same thing as Thrasio or Yaba: it buys companies that sell on Amazon and have a low turnover but attraction. In this case, the partners’ idea is to acquire 40 brands in 2022, develop them worldwide and reach nearly 100 million euros in revenue. “There is no preference for the country of origin of the business, we mostly explore FBA businesses (Filled by Amazon, or that they already successfully sell on Amazon), regardless of which part of the world they are in,” explains Lucas Villanueva, who has more than ten years of experience with Amazon’s logistics platform, to JE.
The planned acquisitions follow the purchase of Spanish Incrível, Amazon’s first marketing agency in the neighboring country, which has more than a hundred brands, including L’Oreal, Electrolux, Tous or Panasonic.