Nektria is a startup that develops SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions aimed at last mile for ecommerce, aligning the interests of online consumers, ecommerce, operators/logistics costs, and cities.
Oriol Serra, David Costa, Victor Tejedo, Miguel Valls and Guillermo Ricarte founded the company in 2012, a platform that provides a solution for online supermarkets: RECShipping, a program that optimizes logistics through dynamic prices (incentives) that are modified in real time for each e-shopper. With this technology, the ecommerce manages to reduce operating costs by up to 20% and improve conversion by up to 5%.
The name Nektria comes from Nectria, a mushroom species. David Costa, co-founder of the company, is a biologist, so they thought it would simplify the registration of the company name.
The startup is accelerated by La Salle Technova and has leading investors from Silicon Valley, London, Madrid and Barcelona. So far, they have called three seed rounds with triple F investors, Business Angels and Family Offices. Their last round of series A in 2017 was led by Expo Capital (Luxembourg) and was mainly used to add new members to the team.
Nektria has been awarded the Catalan SME with the greatest potential for innovation and internationalization in the XXI Investor Forum of ACCIÓ Generalitat de Cataluña, recognized as “the most innovative SaaS for e-commerce in Europe in 2016” by Club eCommerce Crossborder, and winner of the “Seal of Excellence Horizon 2020 European Commission” in November 2018.
At the moment they only operate in Spain, working in three main areas. On the one hand, on how to deal with the problem of the last mile, since they do it via interaction with the final consumer, something that nobody had done until now.
On the other hand, the use of the powerful algorithm integrated within the three tools that facilitate the optimization and subsequent execution of the routes: variable price grid in real time, dashboard optimization and messenger solution.
Finally, the team, with more than eight years of experience in the mobility and logistics sector, as well as advisors of reference in the sector.
Currently, all its clients come from the consumer goods, water and food sectors, so they expect to reach new vertical markets such as furniture, household appliances, gardening, among others by 2019, regardless of the size of the companies.