Actera to invest $130 million in Vivense

A private equity firm focused on Turkey, Actera will invest $130 million in Vivense. The investment agreement has been signed. With this investment, the aim is to support the fast growth of Vivense in Turkey with new investments and to accelerate its globalization activities that initiated in London.

The founder and CEO of Vivense, Kemal Erol said the following on the investment:

As the Vivense team, we are all very excited about and proud of this investment of Actera. Sharing the same vision with Actera to make Vivense an inspiring, innovative, and professional brand of home and living products on a global scale renders this investment quite meaningful. The faith that Actera has in the Vivense team and culture will lead us to greater success. With this investment, we will maintain our fast growth by reinforcing our logistics and delivery infrastructure. By developing our technology further, we will become a strong sales channel that expands globally under the brand of Vivense for the producers in furniture and home categories in Turkey. With our special collections, we will further enrich our product range. We continue to increase the number of our showrooms and stores. We want everyone to be able to reach the Vivense experience more easily through physical and digital channels.

With the new investments we will make in our e-commerce platform, we want to make the experience we offer to our customers in the furniture and home category even better. We will continue to support furniture producers in Turkey to further improve their quality. Meanwhile, we wish to enter the global market with the business model we have created by combining e-commerce and showroom, which has been particularly influential in our rapid growth. Along with the showroom that we will open in London in September, our e-commerce website will become operational all across the United Kingdom at the beginning of 2021. We want to expand our company and existing products in Turkey to global, starting from the UK, with this business model.

Actera stated that it had full confidence in the Vivense team and the potential of the Vivense brand and that it had made this investment decision to accelerate that potential. Vivense, which delivered 500.000 pieces of furniture and home products to its customers in 2019 and now serves with its team of 417 employees, offers its services in cities such as Adana, Ankara, Bursa, Denizli, Diyarbakır, Eskişehir, Gaziantep, İstanbul, İzmir, Kayseri, Kocaeli, Konya, Mersin, and Samsun with its 54 branches. According to the information shared at the end of last year, the company stated that it planned to grow 170% in 2020 by opening 35 new showrooms. 

Alp Saul, Can Yücaoğlu, Evren Üçok, Gamze Yücaoğlu, Hasan Aslanoba, Fabrice Grinda, Jose Marin and Cem Sertoğlu are among the current investors of Vivense, which was founded in 2013 by Kemal Erol. Besides these names, Earlybird is also an investor of Vivense.

Among the companies that Actera invested in to date, there are companies such as Cinemaximum, Karnaval, MacFit, Dünya Varlık, Mey İçki, Çelebi, Kamil Koç, Gratis, and Tam Faktoring.