Faire Wholesale Reaches $12.4 Billion Value in Funding Round

(Bloomberg) -- Online marketplace Faire Wholesale Inc. said it’s valued at $12.4 billion after a $400 million funding round.

The investment was led by Durable Capital Partners, D1 Capital Partners and Dragoneer Investment Group, the company said in a statement that confirmed an earlier Bloomberg News report on its funding plans.

Faire sells wholesale goods as varied as apparel and home furnishings to storefront businesses through its website, working with more than 250,000 retailers around the world. The San Francisco-based startup was valued at $7 billion in a funding round announced in June.

The capital raised in the round will be used, in part, to further international expansion, said Max Rhodes, Faire’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “Europe is going to be a huge part of our future,” he said.

Rhodes attributes some of Faire’s growth to renewed interest in supporting local shops during the coronavirus pandemic, a trend that broadly benefited such businesses.

“There’s been a universal movement toward shopping small,” he said. “The pandemic caused a services recession, not a goods recession.”   

In addition to brick-and-mortar stores, Faire is seeing rising demand from Instagram influencers, some of whom buy items wholesale to sell to their fans.

Faire will likely go public eventually, said Christian Jensen, a partner at Dragoneer Investment Group. It “will make a wonderful public company whenever they choose to do so,” he said.

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