Bottoms up! Vivino uncorks $10.3m in follow-on funding to grow its wine-scanner app globally

Just seven months after wine-centric startup Vivino nabbed a $1m Series A round, the Danish company has announced a follow-on round of funding that sees it garner another $10.3m for its coffers.

Founded in 2009, Vivino is proving to be a popular tool for wine-drinkers, with an iOS, BlackBerry and Android app that lets users snap a photo of a wine label which is then matched against a database of more than one million tipples to reveal the bottle’s producer, brand, name, varietals and even the vintage.

Vivino recently integrated Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, which it says increased its success-rate of matching wine labels to 86%, almost double what it was a year previous.

The app also serves as a social network of sorts, connecting wine geeks through shared reviews, with users able to share their thoughts across the usual social channels.

Vivino now claims north of two million wine-label scans per month – compared with just 80,000 scans per month in April last year.

The latest round was led by Balderton Capital, with participation from previous investors which includes Skype founder Janus Friis, Seed Capital and Creandum, and brings its total amount of investment to $12.4 million.

Heini Zachariassen, Vivino’s founder and CEO, says the bumper investment will be used to develop the business more broadly across Europe and the Americas.

“It’s very satisfying to me that we are the first wine app to receive this level of investment and that all of our existing investors are participating again in this latest funding round,” says Zachariassen. “Their enthusiasm for Vivino and our phenomenal growth to date certainly validate our strategy and the acceptance we are receiving around the world.”