Swappie, the Finnish platform for buying and selling refurbished iPhones, has announced a €108m Series C funding round.

This latest round brings the company’s total funding to c.€150m.

Swappie’s goal is to become the leading European player in the refurbished smartphone sector. The company said the latest funding will go towards scaling operations in Ireland and the 14 other markets.

Sami Marttinen, Co-founder and CEO, commented: “People are increasingly looking for ways to lessen their environmental impact and locking on to the fact that smartphone purchasing is an area we can all address.

“We truly believe that Swappie can drive consumer awareness and trust in the sector by standardising quality, championing the role of sustainability, and making buying a refurbished smartphone as common as buying a used car.”  

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The total smartphone market is worth €100bn in Europe, with used or refurbished phones making up 10% of that.

Swappie’s turnover in 2020 was €97m compared with €31m the year before, though the company does not disclose profitability or otherwise.

Founders Sami Marttinen and Jiri Heinonen settled on their used phone idea after a trial-and-error approach to entrepreneurship. After working in his father’s construction business, Marttinen studied marketing and met Heinonen while in college.

“We didn’t have any phenomenally great ideas, but we just went on to test as many possible different things as we could,” says Marttinen, who admits to many failed attempts at founding a business before Swappie.

The idea for Swappie came after Marttinen bought a second-hand iPhone online from a scammer who took his money and didn’t send the phone. Neither founder had any expertise in servicing mobile devices but they saw a niche and went for it.

The venture was established at Maria 01, a start-up campus in Helsinki. According to Marttinen: “Besides refurbishing and repairing phones, we also enhance them so that in many cases they are functionally better than they were when new.

“For instance, if the soldering on the phone's motherboard was poorly executed, it easily becomes broken. We repair the motherboard by strengthening its soldered joints and by making the joints more flexible.”

Any iPhone is expensive, even recycled ones. For buyers, the key issue is the battery capacity, which reduces over time. As the battery’s health degrades, so does its ability to deliver maximum performance.

According to Swappie, Apple considers any iPhone with a battery capacity of 80% or above to be in optimal condition. (To check battery health on an iPhone, go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health).

Below 80%, the phone will still function but time between charge cycles will be significantly shorter. In the iPhone range, each new model tends to be more powerful than those that came before it, while also adding new features that preserve and extend its battery life. 

Newer models, regardless of whether their capacity is below 100%, tend to have longer battery life than their older counterparts and will be useful for longer as a result.

Battery concerns aside, Swappie’s pitch goes beyond saving a few euros. Nordic tech fund Inventure is an investor in Swappie and says that its interest is partly down to the company’s focus on reusing devices.

Inventure’s Lauri Kokkila commented: “Millennials place far more importance on corporate impact than older generations. One driver of growth in the future will be how companies try to empower consumers to make more sustainable choices.

“Swappie uses materials effectively and recycles them, on top of which it extends the useful lifetime of phones by refurbishing them. We believe these arguments speak for the company and will accelerate its success.”

In Ireland, Swappie has competition from the Fónua brand Mint Plus. Fónua is a sizeable mobile phone and accessories distributor that provides fulfilment, logistics, repairs and other services to phone retailers.

Mint Plus sells used iPhones and other devices online and in partner stores nationwide. Mint Plus operates alongside Fónfix, a longer-established Fónua brand that provides phone repair services from retail locations.

Mint Plus taps into Fónua’s retail partner channels to source the refurbished phones listed on its website for resale. Like Swappie, the business also provides 12-month warranties.

Images: Getty