Richmond’s Mobius Materials has raised $735,000 in a pre-seed round to upgrade its two-way marketplace for second-hand electronics parts.
The round was led by Los Angeles-based Undeterred Capital and included participation from several Virginia-based angel investors. Founder Margaret Upshur said she connected with the Virginia investors through Lighthouse Labs and Startup Virginia.
“We also pulled in some additional West Coast investors for the rest of the funds,” she said.
Her company allows organizations to sell excess inventory on the open market. Upshur started the company in San Francisco but relocated to Richmond during the pandemic.
She plans to use the money for two projects. First, the company wants to build an action system into the platform. If people want to purchase certain parts, they will be able to request bids. Currently, buyers must make selections from individual sellers.
The other upgrade to the marketplace is dynamic pricing. Upshur said the electronics parts market changes quickly, and that alters supply and demand. Dynamic pricing automatically adjusts the price of a part as demand changes.
“There are these shortages that happen in different categories all the time,” Upshur said. “You can have price fluctuations on a single part from 20% of [the manufacturer’s suggested retail price] to a pivot of over five to 10 times MSRP.”
Upshur got the marketplace up and running last year. The company does around 10 transactions a month and each transaction averages about $10,000. She is hoping to clear $1 million in revenue this year.
Besides Upshur, the company has two full-time employees and a contractor. Upshur said she is planning to hire a back-end engineer in the coming weeks to help her build out the new features. The goal is to have the auction feature finished in the coming weeks and complete work on dynamic pricing by the end of the summer.
Upshur said she believes the upgrades to the site will move the company forward. A lot of the work with the platform now is done manually, and that is labor-intensive. Because the market changes so quickly, the new features will allow the site to grow.
“Now we can really press on the gas with this funding,” Upshur said. “We have been getting a lot of feedback from customers over the last few months, so we know what we need to build. We need to build these features and unblock ourselves operationally. We need to automate a lot of things.”
