Double exit for Booncy and Salesoar acquired by the WeBravo group
“Al di là dei grandi risultati raggiunti da queste startup ci ha convinto la qualità del team management”: intervista a Michele Legnaioli Co-founder e Co-CEO del gruppo specializzato in digital couponing e affiliate marketing
WeBravo srl digital company Fiorentina better known as Bravo Savings Network, specialized in digital couponing and affiliate marketing, has finalized the acquisition of Booncy, which had previously acquired control of Salesoar.
This transaction will produce more than 50 million euros in turnover, which marks the birth of a European player, redesigning the structure of the Webravo group and giving Nana Bianca the opportunity to continue to follow closely the results of the double exit while remaining invested in the new group. A result celebrated by the startup studio as a demonstration of the contribution that a place of contamination and training like White Dwarf can make to the entrepreneurial development of the territory. We asked a Michele Legnaioli, Co-founder and Co-CEO of WebRavo, an overview of the history and projects of the group specialized in digital couponing and affiliate marketing.
Let's start with a little' From the history of WeBravo: from'Almost 10 years have passed since the opening of the Bravosconto portal, what were the main stages of your journey?
The BravoSconto portal was founded in 2015 from a project shared with Marco Farnararo and Claudio Veratti with the aim of providing online users with thousands of discount codes, coupons and verified offers on the main e-commerce. We started from the Italian market, at a time when e-commerce still had small numbers, convinced that we should have set ourselves the goal of growing abroad. We chose an Italian name, “bravo”, that was well known abroad in a positive sense and that characterizes the entire group, BRAVO SAVINGS NETWORK.
At the beginning we had modest numbers but we never closed at a loss, not even the first year, this allowed us to increase our advertising investment, invest in the promotion of discount codes and open portals in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in a few years.
The big bet was to face the much more competitive American market, today we have 3 people working for us based in the USA. We are still focusing on overseas growth and, on the positive side, we have not abandoned any of the open markets.
We had the real change of perspective with the investment fund's entry into the capital in 2022 Xenon Small Cap, a private equity fund specialized in investments in B2B services companies with high technological value. Today our goal is to give a different structure to the group, the offer of discount codes is only one part of digital marketing, we want to seize the opportunities that come from the many tools in this sector. Hence the first acquisition in 2023 of CheBuoni (operator in the field of lead generation) and the one that involves today Booncy and Salesoar.
The need to differentiate your services coincided with the decision to acquire on Booncy, what are the reasons?
Booncy is a small group that is very strong on CSS activities, which works with large marketplaces and eCommerce, has obtained an overall conversion rate of between 4% and 6% and more than 1 billion in gross market value generated for partners in 2023 in Europe, also including the UK market.
Salesoar — also founded within the Florentine startup studio — has developed a leading technology in the automation of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaigns through the SaaS platform, used by major Italian and European e-commerce to manage customer acquisition through search engines.
But beyond what the Booncy group is doing, the quality of its management team has convinced us. People who have been able to reinvent themselves more than once (the founding members of Booncy) have started their journey thanks and together with the team that founded Viralize, a leading company in the production of video advertising based on artificial intelligence founded precisely in White Dwarf), a quality that in the digital world is a real asset.
Taking a step back, how did you get in touch with White Dwarf?
Apart from any parochialism, we are thrilled that all this operation, which gives life to one of the largest digital marketing groups in Europe, takes place in Florence. The contact with Nana Bianca played a leading role in this. I know its founders, Paolo Barberis, Jacopo Marello and Alessandro Sordi From the time of DADA. It was the nineties and as president of Fiorentina Gas I appointed DADA to create the first website. Ten years later, together with Claudio Veratti, we once again crossed paths with the founders of Nana Bianca to develop a digital LED lamp (My Wight), one of the first smart lighting devices in the world. We then arrived at Operation Booncy: a result of mutual professional esteem.
A flash on future prospects and new products: how much'Can artificial intelligence support marketing?
In the digital marketing sector, it is necessary to process a large number of data. We are seeing that the AI developed today, without waiting for tomorrow's, is able to help this process in a very important way. We intend to develop new products guided by Artificial Intelligence algorithms and to do so we believe we need continuous training for teams, even younger ones.
