elopage Is Expanding – With the Best Community Behind It!

Today’s article is not about new features, changed tax regulations, or use cases of our customers. Today is about giving you, our supporters and users, a heartfelt “Thank you”, and to give you an idea of what the future holds.

You may have already heard the big news: We announced an initial funding of 32 million euros (38 Million US dollars). But what does this actually mean for you?

Those who have known us for a while know how we started: As a completely self-financed company, everything came from our own coffers right from the start. True to the motto “Failure is part of growth!”, we financed everything ourselves, experienced setbacks and overcame them. We have never given up on further developing the platform in our own company. A picture of the very first transaction via elopay (former name of elopage) – we earned just under 35 cents on it – still hangs in our office. That was in 2015. We have been profitable since 2018.

Our drive? The community!

If we’ve made it to where we are today, we know that it’s only thanks to such a strong community as you. This great community has given us the will and the courage not to give up and to offer as many entrepreneurs and companies as possible a basis for their success. Getting your feedback and experiencing your own drive has inspired us again and again to make elopage even better. 

Just look at everything we have done together! At the first EPX in 2019, we welcomed 1200 participants, a fifth of whom went on to build their online business in a huge 12-hour workathon. As soon as we can host those types of events again, we’ll definitely be doing it – we’re already looking forward to your spirit!

And there’s been more: in recent years we’ve made more than 50,000 phone calls, answered more than 156,000 support tickets, and welcomed more than 100,000 webinar participants. The sum of all this has led us to today’s point with more than 40,000 elopage users and more than 3 million end customers. Again: thank you for always being there.

What does this funding mean for you? 

As you know: We never stand still. What this investment allows us to do is to pave the way for the next important milestones in our development.

At the core of this development is the satisfaction of our customers. That is why we will invest in even better service and even more innovations. We want you to be the front-runner in your field of business with elopage. To this end, we are pushing forward with the expansion of our technology – and believe us when we tell you that we’re far from being maxed out.

Our goal is to provide digital entrepreneurs in Europe with a completely new kind of infrastructure to build and scale their business.

Özkan Akkilic, Co-Founder of elopage

For this to succeed, we can’t forget the people behind the software. We currently have 70 employees working to ensure that our community has the best possible experience with elopage. By the end of the year, that number will be going up to 190 – because only a strong and positive team can properly support and advance our customers’ businesses.

For all of their relentless efforts, we would like to say a big thank you to the entire elopage team! Together, we empower entrepreneurs! 

In addition, we would like to further expand our standing in the DACH region in order to empower even more entrepreneurs. With the budget, we want to expand the borders beyond and push our European expansion this year and next. Our big goal is to empower one million entrepreneurs by 2025!

Investing instead of bootstrap – What has changed? 

We’ve never been hugely motivated by the idea of external funding. Our philosophy has always been to master everything ourselves and to remain independent. As a bootstrap company, we were completely self-financed and took all of our own risks. So, why the sudden change?

Since day one we have had big goals and every day we are outgrowing ourselves. With Target Global, Partech Ventures and Avid Ventures, we have found three investors who follow the same philosophy as we do. They have proven to us that they support companies in the growth phase and bring a time advantage in achieving strategic goals. And because we have always had big goals and grow beyond ourselves every day, this is exactly what we need for this next phase of  growth. 

With this investment we are turning on the turbo for our growth and want to further develop elopage into the preferred SaaS platform and payment provider for digital businesses. 

Tolga Önal, Co-Founder of elopage

We’re excited about seeing our journey pick up even more momentum through our investors, and to help Europe’s entrepreneurs and creators build and scale their ideas.

Stay tuned, because we’re really just getting started!