Portland-based Sella landed $3 million from investors led by Seattle-based Flying Fish Ventures.
The startup is designed to help people sell their stuff online. It’s not a marketplace itself, instead it takes the gig worker idea — think transit or food delivery — and brings it resale.
For a flat fee, a Sella contractor will pick up your item, then take pictures and store it. Sella will write up a description and handle the listing on resale sites like eBay, Mercari and Craigslist. When the item sells, the person who picked it up handles the shipping. You get the money electronically.
Sella operates in Portland and Dallas, Texas. This round of funding will be used to expand to other markets.
“Resale is growing more than 20 times faster than retail, but we’re still barely scratching the ‘stuff’ surface,” said founder and CEO Byron Binkley in a written statement. “People aren’t merchants. They don’t participate in resale because the selling friction is simply too high. We’ve proven that if you remove those barriers and prioritize seller profit, it works. We’re eager to see it work at scale with this new investment.”
The core Sella team is seven people and that covers product and engineering, design, operations and marketing. The company is hiring and expects to be 10 by the end of the year. The company has 30 contractors and resale experts that gather, post and ship the items being sold. That team is expected to be 50 by the end of the year.
Prior to this round the company launched with about $1 million from angel investors. For its part, Flying Fish sees Sella as an efficient solution to helping consumers move their stuff. As the company builds its processes and introduces automation into the mix the investor is even more bullish.
“We’re seeing really interesting things happening with consumer-to-consumer right now. The trends accelerated by the pandemic are no longer trends, they are large-scale shifts in behavior,” said Geoff Harris, managing partner at Flying Fish in a written statement. “The way people consume is changing, making the timing key for our investment in Sella, which we forecast as the 'Amazon for resale.’”
Binkley sees Sella as an onramp for a more circular economy for people who might not think to sell their stuff online.
Sella is the latest Portland-based startup to make news with its goal of creating a more circular economy. Last month, the founders of Freeya announced the upcoming app that takes the tradition of the Portland free pile and brings it digital.
