In 2023, 40% of consumers purchased secondhand products. By opting for secondhand retailers, shoppers reported savings of up to 35%. Haz, a social commerce app, aims to leverage these consumer trends by integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and network effects. The app maintains a catalog of every purchase a user makes by scanning email receipts to create digital listings automatically. It provides a real-time valuation of all owned items, allowing users to offer items for sale effortlessly—eliminating the need for manual listings, photography, and description writing, unlike traditional online marketplaces. Additionally, friends can explore each other’s inventories, which enhances purchasing options. As transactions occur within a circle of friends, Haz effectively reduces the uncertainty and safety concerns present in other marketplaces. Haz is currently available for iOS users.
London TechWatch caught up with Haz Cofounder Ronan Harvey-Kelly to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, recent round of funding, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised $1.4M in pre-Seed funding led by Speedinvest with participation from the scout programmes of A16Z (cofounder Reface, Dima Shvets), Atomico (Sameer Singh), Concept Ventures (Oliver Kicks), and notable individuals from Lapse, Lendable, Lottie & Ecoigo.
Tell us about your product or service.
Haz is a social commerce app enabling friends to see what each other are buying and selling in real time. We use AI to automate the digital listing of anything you have ever bought, meaning there is no manual or time-consuming process to resale something you own on Haz.
What inspired the start of Haz?
I built a small clothing resale business in 2017 where we’d buy second-hand clothing in bulk from across Europe and then resell on marketplaces within the UK. This gave me first-hand insight into how tedious the resale process was, inspiring the concept of Haz to use AI to make this much more entertaining and efficient.
How is it different?
Haz lists everything people own on our platform, not just what they want to resale. The listing process is completely automated in real-time. You can connect with friends to get live notifications as and when they buy or sell anything. All items are tied to their original digital receipts and sellers have to take videos of items before they can sell.
What market are you targeting and how big is it?
We are targeting the global second-hand market. For apparel alone, the market is forecast to grow to $350 billion by 2028 with the refurbished electronics market set to scale to $272.91 billion by 2031 also.
What’s your business model?
We charge a buyer protection fee on any transactions that occur on the marketplace.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
As we enter an economic downturn, people will look for more ways to make money. One of these options will be to resell the things you already own. Building a solution that makes it easy for people to access cash, tends to be relatively recession-proof.
What was the funding process like?
We started fundraising at the beginning of December and had full commitment for our round before Christmas, around 3 weeks from start to finish. We closed the legal process by mid-February. Although this seems relatively efficient for a funding round, we faced our fair share of rejections within an extremely short period of time before assembling a cap table we are extremely proud of.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Getting to that first yes and proving that our go to market strategy was viable. Investment is all driven by FOMO, it can be your worst enemy before you get that first commitment. Once you get that first yes, momentum is everything.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the cheque? Using technology only recently made accessible, building within a huge and growing market and a plan on how to scale the business cost-effectively.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Hire a small team, scale our initial user base to a point where we can look into statistically significant data to help us learn, iterate, and grow.
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Don’t let the current sentiment that fundraising is extremely difficult right now put you off. Now is a great time to build a business, think about the number of successful startups that were born out of recessions or periods of economic decline. If you are building with the right team, in the right market, there will be investors actively looking to support you.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We are laser-focused on building out the social concept around the traditional second-hand marketplace. We want to build as cost-effectively as possible, meaning product-led growth will be a priority. The UK is just the start, mainland Europe naturally provides an opportunity for more demand liquidity as cross-border transactions are more efficient.
What is your favourite restaurant in London?
Spice of Night in Barnes.
