[Germany] Serial entrepreneurs and investors Christoph Janz and Mark Gazecki have invested in Momox, Germany’s leading online trade-in service for media products. Momox has run on revenues since 2003, but is now pulling in around €10m a year. The German-only site, which lets users trade-in their used books, CDs, DVDs and games for cash, will use the investment to expand (and hopefully get a UI makeover, geez). The combined investment was €250,000.
Private individual traders enter the barcode of the CDs, DVDs or video game into the site and then get a trade-in offer from Momox immediately. If the person is happy with the price they send in the item and Momox pays the shipping cost and then pays the trader. Many eBay sellers switch to Momox, finding it much easier. Around ten thousand new items are added every day.
In this respect is is almost exactly like SpeedSell in the UK, although SpeedSell is much newer and deals in less items.
Founder and CEO of Momox, Christian Wegner, put the site together in 2003 after losing his job and realising he could make money buying CDs on the flea market’s of Berlin and selling them on eBay for a profit. Only after his girlfriend asked him to choose between the “home warehouse” and her, he rented his first warehouse in 2004. The initial 20 sq/m. is now over 2.500 sq/m today, but Momox has kept a low PR profile.
Despite that it’s now one of the leading online trade-in services for books, CDs, DVDs and video games in Germany.
Christoph Janz has founded two Internet businesses since 1997, DealPilot.com and Pageflakes. Mark Gazecki was a partner at Atlas Venture between 2000 and 2007 and founded two online games firms, GameGenetics and MegaZebra.
Janz told me: “Momox has bought more than 4.5 million items since 2006, it’s a pretty large and profitable company. Christian didn’t need the money but he wanted to get our expertise and help to further expand Momox’ market leadership position.”
Momox is Janz’s fourth angel investment following Zendesk (Denmark/USA), FreeAgent Central (Scotland) and Clio (Canada).