We are excited to announce our investment in Etvas, a Hamburg-based startup, together with High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and main incubator. Etvas has raised €1M in Seed funding to capture the growing €20B market of value-added services in Europe.

At Plug and Play, we work with over 500 corporate partners around the globe and Fintech, Brand & Retail, and Insurtech are some of our key focus areas. Industry players have been struggling with finding new approaches towards engagement with clients. That’s why, when we first met the Etvas team, we knew that their solution is a game-changer.

“We are looking forward to working with Plug and Play Ventures, who are known for their sound investment selection. We are particularly impressed that Plug and Play Ventures discovered four Unicorns in the last two years. We are honored to have been selected as a forward-looking company and to now be part of their exclusive network.” — Etvas.

Today’s customers expect more than a traditional services offering, and driving customer loyalty and managing service expectations can be a huge challenge. That’s why value-added services can provide a key competitive advantage.

However, adding one new service can take up to 6 months for a corporation and up to 18 months if the corporation is a bank. One of the main challenges in finding the right solution revolves around a simple and efficient vendor for onboarding and procurement. Instead of individually onboarding each single service provider, a single API connection is crucial for easy and quick implementation on the corporate side — Let us introduce our new portfolio company, Etvas.

Etvas: Building the Most Comprehensive Marketplace for Value Added Services

Etvas has developed an AI-based marketplace to offer personalized, value-added services. As a customer engagement platform, Etvas optimizes customer touch-points to drive better KPIs and help financial institutions, insurance companies, retailers, and others to generate additional revenue and drive customer loyalty.

Etvas is the connection between industry players, value-added services and customers

Etvas is built to become a fully self-serviced, cloud-based, and API-first platform. The company scouts services, negotiates prices with the service partners, and sets up the contracts. They then integrate all service partners into a single platform to create a frictionless usage and payment process of any service. End customers sign up once, and payments are done in just one place.

The Etvas marketplace is powered by automated, AI-driven offers. Leveraging transaction data and AI/ML, Etvas will deliver targeted VAS at the right time to increase conversion rate. For example, Etvas will offer to insure a customer’s new laptop, or travel insurance when someone books a trip abroad.

Furthermore, Etvas allows third parties to build apps using the Etvas toolkit for visual design and subsequently run these apps in the Etvas cloud. Businesses will launch VAS products as Etvas apps on the Etvas marketplace in the same manner in which companies have been built on top of the Shopify, Atlassian or Salesforce app stores (in development).

Etvas’ Main Customers

By partnering with Etvas, corporations can navigate through the fragmented market of value-added services and mitigate the vendor on-boarding and procurement challenges. Etvas’ main customers are financial institutions, insurance companies, and brands from various industries.

Do you want to learn more about Etvas? Get in touch with us at frankfurt@pnptc.com if you’re a financial institution, or at c.wais@pnptc.com for insurers, brands, and retailers.

Check out the official press release of Etvas’ investment announcement.