Appear Here has secured a $14m (£10.8m) investment from a cohort of partners including JLL Spark and Concrete VC in its biggest fundraise to date.
The retail marketplace closed the funding round, which is more than triple the value of its last Series B raise, at the start of the year with investment from JLL Spark, Octopus, Forward Partners, Meyer Bergman, Matthew Freud and Concrete VC.
The investment will be deployed as part of an expansion into new markets to reflect changing requirements and a shift in consumer behaviour as a result of the pandemic.
Appear Here founder Ross Bailey said the company is now looking at resilient, creative cities that have weathered the Covid storm particularly well, such as Stockholm and Berlin. It is also eyeing more local markets in countries where Appear Here already has a presence, due to the shift to flexible working.
He said: “We are looking at commuter towns as people have got to know their local areas. Places like Somerset in the UK and Connecticut in the US.”
The $14m raise was part of a strategic deal, with investment initially set to be deployed throughout 2020. This plan was temporarily put on hold in early March, just before Appear Here was forced to shut its offices due to the pandemic. But Bailey said that after a difficult few months, the firm is arguably now a more attractive investment opportunity than it was before Covid-19 struck.
“The view from most of our investors is that Appear Here is a good hedge in difficult times because this business will make more sense when real estate values start to decline and there is a reset,” said Bailey. “Big landlords who were already thinking about a change in approach to retail will start to think ‘we pushed that concept away for a while but now maybe the time has come to change’.”
He added that Covid has accelerated a pattern the sector was already seeing – a move away from traditional retail towards more flexible, creative space – and that a spike in unemployment would likely fuel the sector.
He said: “As we move from this humanitarian health crisis into an economic one, Appear Here is in a position to be a central service. In previous downturns, we have seen more entrepreneurial activity in the aftermath. Right now, we are in a situation where, in the UK for example, we’ve got half of young people unemployed or furloughed.
“There are going to be a lot of young creative people who, sadly, aren’t going to have jobs soon and I think a lot of these people might want to create. They will need spaces to make that happen.”
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