Leap

In 2018, I wrote a memo to crystalize my thoughts on the retail space. Even then, the retail industry was experiencing unprecedented disruption at the hands of Amazon. I titled the memo, “The Rebirth of Retail” and called for someone who could be an offline competitor to Amazon/Shopify. The hypothesis was that if someone could establish a shared offline retail platform that leveraged data to optimize the placement and utilization of brands across locations, they could have a monopolistic advantage over the rest of the retail market, experiencing lower costs, higher store utilization, better risk management and higher sales per store than any legacy retailer could on their own. In doing so, they’d have the opportunity to capture millions of stores and grab a huge chunk of a $1T prize.

A few months back, we wrote about the initial progress Leap had been making coming out of the pandemic as we announced their long undisclosed Series A. Today, we’re excited to announce that Leap has raised $50m led by BAM Elevate to power the future of retail. As we noted in our past post, Covid was not kind to the retail world. When we entered April of 2020, GMV on the Leap platform was down effectively 100%. The company was resilient, however, and finished 2020 up close to 100%. While 2021 continued to present Covid challenges, the story for Leap has been very different, growing from 13 to 47 stores and increasing in revenue by 4.3x.