Wine App Vivino Receives Series A Funding From Creandum

COPENHAGEN, Denmark --(Business Wire)--

Vivino, the social wine app that allows users to keep track of wines they drink, rate them for future reference, and share favorites with others, today announced it received $1 million in Series A financing from Creandum, the Nordic venture capital firm best known for its early investments in digital music service Spotify (News - Alert), social payments company iZettle, and mobile gifting phenom Wrapp.

Using smartphones to tap the $125 billion wine market, Vivino's mission is to make choosing and purchasing wine online as easy, fun and social as drinking it.

Vivino received seed funding last year from SEED Capital and Skype (News - Alert) co-founder Janus Friis.

"Vivino has all the characteristics of a great investment: seasoned team, innovative technology, elegant product, viable business model, and a very large market ripe for disruption," said Creandum General Partner Martin Hauge, who has joined Vivino's board of directors. "In short order Vivino has become the fastest growing wine app in the world, and we believe it has the potential to change wine ecommerce forever - much like Spotify is doing with music."

Today only 4 percent to 8 percent of wine is sold online.

Here's how it works: Vivino's app lets you take a photograph with your Apple (News - Alert) or Android smartphone of any wine you're drinking. Using advanced scanning technology Vivino autmatically recognizes labels and matches them to an extensive database of nearly 500,000 wines. Users then note the ones they like or dislike, read wine reviews, follow other people's Vivino activity to discover new wines, and soon, order and buy - by the bottle or case.

"We've seen how Creandum has helped startups like Spotify from very early days grow and become world leaders in their industry, and we think they're they perfect partner for now helping us monetize our growth, and expand our business around the world - especially in the U.S.," said Vivino Founder Heini Zachariassen.

Use of Vivino has increased tenfold in the past six months, reaching nearly 100,000 monthly downloads. In November alone, active users on average scanned seven wine labels per month. To date, Vivino has been the No.1 most downloaded app in the food and drink category in 11 countries, and reached the No.14 spot in the U.S.

Before starting Vivino in 2009, Zachariassen founded BullGuard Ltd., one of the fastest growing Internet and mobile security brands.

About Creandum

Creandum is a Nordic venture capital firm investing in innovative and fast-growing technology companies within consumer, software and hardware industries. The firm has €250M under management and 20 portfolio companies like Spotify, Cint and Videoplaza ranging from early stage to expansion. All investment professionals at Creandum have started companies or been part of successful startups during their career. Creandum has as one of its corner investors the 6th Swedish National Pension Fund and is among other major international investors supported by the European Communities Growth and Employment Initiative, MAP - ETF Start-up Facility. For more information, please visit www.creandum.com

About Vivino

Vivino is a vibrant wine community built on top of a huge database of 500,000 wines from 20,000 wineries all over the world. Vivino is the fastest growing wine app in the U.S. and globally, and its users provide tasting notes, ratings, price info, and much more on a daily basis. Vivino was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. Never again forget another great bottle of wine at www.vivino.com.