WeTransfer discloses €35m secondary funding round

19 Aug 2019

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WeTransfer has not disclosed its latest valuation, but said that it has been profitable for six years.

WeTransfer, the Amsterdam-based file-sharing platform that was founded in 2009, has disclosed a €35m secondary funding round.

While the cloud-based file transfer company reported that there was “significant” participation from existing investor Highland Europe, the funding round was led by European growth equity firm HPE Growth.

TechCrunch reports that as it is secondary funding, which involves a secondary buyer purchasing an interest in an existing fund from a current investor, no new money has entered WeTransfer’s balance sheet.

It is also reported that WeTransfer’s co-founder, the Dutch entrepreneur known by the mononym Nalden, will step down from the company’s supervisory board and be replaced by HPE’s Jonne de Leeuw.

Nalden’s fellow co-founder, Bas Beerens, will remain on the board alongside Irena Goldenberg and Tony Zappala from Highland Europe.

No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. The company has also not revealed its valuation but did remark that it has been profitable for the last six years.

Scaling up

Speaking to TechCrunch, WeTransfer CEO Gordon Willoughby said: “The valuation of the company is not public, but what I can tell you is that it’s definitely up significantly since the Series A in 2015. WeTransfer has become a trusted brand in its space with significant scale.”

He added that the service has over 50m users each month, spread across 195 countries, with more than 1.5bn files shared on the platform every month.

Former Amazon exec Willoughby took over as CEO in early 2017, after Beerens stepped down from the role to focus on his responsibilities as executive chair of the board.

Between WeTransfer’s offices in Amsterdam, LA and New York, the company has 185 employees. Around 150 of these are based in the Dutch headquarters.

Aside from WeTransfer’s primary offering, the company has also developed and acquired a number of apps and services, including sketching tool Paper, which has 25m downloads.

The company also runs content sharing app Collect. In November 2018, WeTransfer relaunched the app with the title Collect by WeTransfer.

Kelly Earley was a journalist with Silicon Republic

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