InvenQuery, a Prairie Village, Kan. startup that provides technology to help retailers of unique merchandise handle inventory, point-of-sale and e-commerce, today announced $650,000 in Series A funding from Dundee Venture Capital of Omaha.
That investment, coupled with $450,000 in angel funding from earlier this year, brings total capital raised by the company in 2012 to $1.1 million.
InvenQuery said in a release that it will use the new funds to enhance its technology and customer outreach. Most of the company’s focus will be on sellers of reused building materials, InvenQuery’s first market.
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“We are thrilled to partner with Dundee Venture Capital,” InvenQuery founder Nathan Benjamin (below) said in a press release. “Mark Hasebroock and his team bring deep expertise in ecommerce and web services that will accelerate our success in the reuse industry and in subsequent vertical markets we are researching like surplus materials from construction and demolition projects that get lost in warehouses.”
Hasebroock, Dundee VC’s founder, said today in an email interview that his firm invested in InvenQuery because the company provides a streamlined solution to an otherwise inefficient process.
“Historically these retailers handled everything manually or with clunky and very expensive software solutions that ignored the retailers basic needs,” he said. “Nathan and Willow (Lundgren) are an excellent team and real visionaries. They have been in this space, are well respected and know the pain points very well. They created the solution and the market has already responded enthusiastically.”
With InvenQuery’s technology, workers at reuse centers — facilities that have been likened to thrift stores for building materials — can use a mobile application to enter items into inventory, and those items will immediately populate an online storefront. At the point-of-sale, InvenQuery’s technology automatically removes items from both the storefront and inventory system.
Two reuse centers in the Kansas City area are currently beta-testing InvenQuery’s technology. That technology also powers the PlanetReuse Marketplace, a site that displays real-time inventory from all participating reuse centers nationwide.
In September, PlanetReuse received a $250,000 grant from Chase and Living Social. Last month, PlanetReuse took first place at the SXSW Eco Startup Showcase in Austin, Texas.
Credits: Photo of Benjamin from invenquery.com.
