iF Lastmile, the company specialized in tech solutions for reverse logistics has closed 3M€ as its second financing round. The new capital will propel the company in their mission of recovering value from returned merchandise and overstocks for the retailer and its clients, thus reducing the waste and environmental impact generated from discarding those products.

The round has been led by KFund and it is supported by top nationaal investors including Inveready and Lanai Partners. Also, Grupo Romeu, the market leader in freight logistics with more than 1.8Bn€ in revenue, and Bergner Group, one of the main European home and kitchenware manufacturers, have joined the round.

The capital received will serve the company to endure its position as the reverse logistics leader in Spain and Portugal and propel its expansion to other European markets. The firm now serves more than 150 Spanish and Portuguese brands with their global network of more than 200.000 drop-off points. In the coming months, they will expand their inspection warehouses to the UK, Germany and Italy

The problem with returns

Only in Europe, reverse logistics costs 250Bn€ to retailers each year. “Returned products can represent up to 40% of sales in categories like fashion and more than 50% are not sold at full price. Losses represent 10% to 12% of the revenue of the product” comments Galo de Reyna, co-founder and co-CEO of iF Lastmile.

The wrong returns management process also promotes fraud and has a tremendous negative impact on sustainability. Thus, many retailers are putting focus on searching solutions to recover the merchandise to sell it, as, currently, 30% of their production ends up in landfills.

iF Lastmile solves this problem by helping brands to route their returned merchandise back to sales in less than 48 hours through different sales channels, that includes re-commerce and recycling.

Their modular tech does not need any integration to digitize and give full visibility of the returns flow to the retailer and their clients. iF Lastmile’s product covers from the end client return request, using a proprietary customizable returns portal, to the pick-up of the product, its inspection, refund, consolidation and sorting to the sales channel.

The control of data and the products enables the automation and optimization of the logistic chain. “We connect retailers to different sales channels, both online and offline, and, by applying proprietary AI algorithms, we choose the sales channel that maximizes the margin and has the least environmental impact”, explains Paul Obando, co-founder and CTO of the company.

The company’s operational model increases productivity and speeds up the path to sales. According to Marcello Valerio, co-founder and co-CEO “an operator has the capacity to process more than 70 products per hour with our tech, only using an effective space of 10m2. This allows brands to scale their business in DTC and marketplaces without neither compromising their margins nor increasing stock levels”.

Fuente: iF Lastmile / K Fund

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