Fidelity Growth Partners Europe leads £3.5m investment in Wahanda

October 17^th 2011 – Wahanda, the UK’s leading online health and beauty marketplace, announced today a £3.5m investment round led by Fidelity Growth Partners Europe (FGPE), a pan-European venture and growth equity investor. Davor Hebel, a Partner at FGPE, joins the board of Wahanda. 

Wahanda was founded in 2008 by Lopo Champalimaud and Salim Mitha, veterans of lastminute.com and Yahoo! respectively.  Its backers include many of Europe’s most prominent entrepreneurs including Brent Hoberman, founder of lastminute.com; Stefan Glaenzer, former executive chairman of last.fm and founder of Passion Capital; Ambient Sound Investment (ASI), founding engineers at Skype; and Wolf Hengst, a leading figure in the hotel hospitality and spa industry and the former COO & President of Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts.

The Wahanda marketplace is aimed at people who want to learn about health, beauty and wellness, search for and book treatments from hundreds of thousands of businesses registered on the site, take advantage of unbeatable offers and share their recommendations and reviews with other users.

The Series B funding will be used to accelerate the company’s growth both in the UK and overseas.  Since its formation three years ago, Wahanda has grown to become the largest health and beauty marketplace in the UK, with more than 10 million consumers visiting the site per year, 250,000 businesses listing their services, tens of thousands of reviews and more than 5,000 exclusive health and beauty offers. 

Lopo Champalimaud, CEO of Wahanda, said: “Our vision is to do for health, beauty and wellness what Amazon did for books.  We have created an online destination where people can find, discover, share and book anything they want to do with health, beauty and wellness. We’re thrilled to partner with Fidelity Growth Partners Europe and we are looking forward to the passion and experience Davor will bring to our board.”

Davor Hebel, Partner at Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, said: “We have been very impressed by the traction that Wahanda has gained in the short time since inception. Lopo had an original idea to transform the health and beauty market by partnering with merchants, while offering the customers a one-stop shop for their wellness needs.  Wahanda is a vertical marketplace akin to TripAdvisor or OpenTable solving a specific problem much better than any general local player.”

Wolf Hengst, Chairman of Wahanda commented: “Throughout my career I have relentlessly focused on delivering exceptional service to my customers.  The model Wahanda has created is doing just that for merchants and customers in health, beauty and wellness.”

What is Wahanda?

Voted ‘Best Online Beauty Site’ by ELLE UK, Wahanda is the world’s leading marketplace for health, beauty and wellness. With more spas, salons, treatments and practitioners listed than any other site, Wahanda offers an interactive community allowing customers to voice recommendations, write reviews and connect with industry experts. In addition to featuring inspiring content, Wahanda offers savings on spa breaks with real-time booking functionality, thousands of health, beauty and fitness offers, daily MobDeals plus their signature Beauty and Spa Gift Vouchers, which are redeemable at over 900 destinations nationwide. Beauty addict, fitness fanatic or yoga guru? Welcome to your new home. www.wahanda.com

Wahanda has won the following awards: Best Beauty Site of 2009 by FabSugar,  ‘Best Online Beauty Site’ by ELLE UK, Best Commerce Startup by the Europas and ranked number 38 in www.startups.co.uk’s Top 100 Startups.