Washington, DC – Optoro Inc, a technology company enabling retailers and manufacturers to increase revenue from returned and excess inventory, today announced a significant Series B investment led by Revolution Growth, with participation from existing investor, Grotech Ventures.
Launched in the Washington, D.C. area in 2008 by Tobin Moore and Adam Vitarello, Optoro leverages its proprietary marketing platform and large data sets to optimize the disposition of returned and excess inventory for some of the country’s most well-known brands. Optoro enables its customers to recover more than double their previous revenues on such products, by directly connecting them to the millions of consumers looking for bargains. For the country’s largest retailers and manufacturers, approximately 10% of all purchases are later returned – representing a costly, logistical challenge. Optoro’s highly scalable, cloud-based platform helps Fortune 500 companies overcome this challenge by revolutionizing the $150 billion market for the recovery of returned and excess inventory, which has until now been dominated by companies that use little technology or data analytics.
“Optoro has discovered a disruptive approach to solving one of the retail industry’s biggest and most costly logistics challenges,” said Revolution Growth co-founder Ted Leonsis, who will join Optoro’s board. “Our sweet spot is working with companies that have a big, built-to-last vision for attacking a significant market – and that’s exactly what Tobin and Adam are doing at Optoro.”
The new investment in Optoro will enable the company to significantly scale its software as a service (SaaS) business and its OptiTurn marketing platform, which uses proprietary pricing algorithms and predictive analytics to drive the highest financial recovery possible for returned and excess inventory. OptiTurn provides automated dynamic pricing and posting on multiple online marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Buy.com, BestBuy and Optoro’s consumer-facing platform Blinq.com, cutting out unnecessary middlemen and enabling companies to sell directly to more than 500 million consumers.
