Wahanda, an online health and beauty marketplace, has secured a £3.5m Series B investment round led by Fidelity Growth Partners Europe (FGPE), a pan-European venture and growth equity investor. As part of the deal Davor Hebel, a partner at FGPE, joins the board of Wahanda. This investment makes Wahanda the 800 pound gorilla of this space, with the opportunity to now build out what is in effect the Open Table for the health and beauty sector. Wahanda last raised a Series A back in 2008 with £1.5m from Ambient Sound Investment.
The funding wil be used to accelerate the company’s growth in the UK and potentially overseas. Since starting there years ago, the site has become the largest health and beauty marketplace in the UK. About 10 million visitors a year, 250,000 businesses listed and 5,000 exclusive health and beauty offers on the Grouponesque offers model.
The Wahanda marketplace lets people search for and book treatments, get offers offers and review outlets. It’s a vertical marketplace akin to TripAdvisor or OpenTable.
Lopo Champalimaud, CEO of Wahanda, says the vision is to “to do for health, beauty and wellness what Amazon did for books.”
Wahanda was founded in 2008 by Lopo Champalimaud and Salim Mitha, veterans of lastminute.com and Yahoo! respectively. Backers include Brent Hoberman, founder of lastminute.com; Stefan Glaenzer, former executive chairman of last.fm and founder of Passion Capital; Ambient Sound Investment (ASI), founding engineers at Skype; and Wolf Hengst, a leading figure in the hotel hospitality and spa industry and the former COO & President of Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts.
Perhaps to celebrate they are offering a deal for TC reader: You can email Judy [ @ ] wahanda.com for a free £25 Wahanda voucher.