Summit Partners is increasing its stake in Rocket Internet‘s portfolio of companies with the announcement today of a €20 million ($26.5 million) investment in the ‘Amazon for Latin America’, Linio.
The cash is the second funding announcement for Linio this month. It was announced earlier in February that German retail company Tengelmann put in what we understand to be $15-20 million.
Summit Partners has previously put money into a number of Rocket-backed ventures. Recently, this has included Brazil’s Dafiti and South East Asia’s Lazada. In December 2012, German site Deutsche Startups reported that Summit had put a total of a “three-digit million sum” into various Rocket-related startups, in deals that had not been officially announced at the time. Dafiti, Lazada and Linio were amongst those mentioned in the report. If the report was completely accurate, we can probably expect more announcements like today’s in the near future.
Summit has a long history of association with Rocket Internet founders, the Samwer brothers. It invested in their ringtone business, Jamba, in 2003, the year before it was acquired by Verisign.
Linio was launched in spring 2012 and already has operations in Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela, selling a wide variety of products. The new investment will be used to expand both the size its presence in Latin America and its product range.
Image credit: Stockbyte / Thinkstock
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