#2 The Nordic app entrepreneurs – Vivino

Back in 2009 Heini Zachariassen walked around in the Danish supermarkets and considered which wine that he should buy. When he wanted to watch a film he used IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes to get the crowds’ opinion, but there were no tool where you as a wine consumer could rate the wine that you drink.

Therefore Heini Zachariassen and Theis Søndergaard founded Vivino that here in 2015, 6 years later is the by far biggest app for wine lovers. In the meantime they have moved to San Francisco and received 11.3 million dollars in venture funding, from the danish fund SEED Capital, swedish VC Creandum, UK based Balderton Capital, Janus Friis and some other angels. From the beginning they have focused on building a user base and building an outstanding database of wine.

Today they have a database of 100 million pictures, 20 million ratings and 8 million users – and they get 20,000 new sign-ups everyday. They have focused on staying pre-revenue in the first couple of years, but have now found some interesting revenue models.

We have recently launched our premium version and we think that offering our users some new premium features have a big potential. But first of all our revenue model is consumer based. When you find a wine that you like you will through our app and website be able to buy that wine. Our website has also the last couple of years had a very significant growth and is now one of the largest online platforms for wine lovers. We think it is very important to have a large present both on people’s smartphones and on the internet tells Heini Zachariasen from Vivino

We asked Heini about how he sees the market for wine platforms and apps, the competitors and how it will look in the future.

I don’t think it is a winner takes it all-market, because we will have to focus and make some decisions that not all wine lover will like. So there will be a space in the market in the future. Our differentiator is not our technology – it is our unique database. We have started from scratch and today we have around 100 million pictures of wine. We are growing really fast right now. The best day so far was in December 2014 where were scanned 1 million wine labels”, Heini Zachariassen tells Nordic Startup Bits

Vivino have with their 8 million users and their huge database of rated wines taken a big step. The next step will be to consolidate their position in the market and test new potential revenue models.