Spareka investment from Demeter

The online self-repair specialist announces a fundraising sum of €5m from Paris Fonds Vert, a fund created by the City of Paris and managed by Demeter

Venture capital 2020, April

E-commerce & retail

"The diagnostic aid makes everyone feel confident, DIY enthusiasts, novices, even children! When we give repair courses in schools to change mindsets, young people get caught up in the game and take less than 10 minutes to change a washing machine resistance. Our goal is to put technology at the service of citizens: we can no longer waste so many devices because of a lack of information"

Geoffroy Malaterre. CEO Spareka

Founded in 2012 by Geoffroy Malaterre, Spareka was created to enable the French to repair their devices themselves.

Activist from the start against planned obsolescence, the company is growing fast and proving that "Repairing is easy".

The construction site is gigantic for Spareka: on a French fleet of 691 million household appliances, there are around 16 000 breakdowns per day and 1,4 million tonnes of electrical and electronic waste thrown away each year, of which more than 66% can be repaired and easily reusable. The first obstacle to repair is its cost, which dissuades many consumers. To tackle this problem, Spareka puts technology at the service of citizens by offering educational tools (tutorials, fault diagnostics, help with video repair) on its website and its app in order to train French people about self-repair for free.

Growing, Spareka saves hundreds of devices a day with the goal of reducing waste, saving families and making consumers proud to fix the problems themselves.

With this fundraiser, Spareka has established itself as a powerful leverage to extend the life of equipment and slow down overconsumption.

Today, we find diagnostics for more than thirty main domestic devices on www.spareka.fr. In the future, each object in average homes will have their own solutions: lamps, musical instruments, furniture, etc. and repairing them will be a breeze. In the long term, the brand plans to embed these chatbots on the websites of its partners: distributors, public bodies, associations ... to enable savings to French people who are thinking of buying a television or a mower while theirs could still work.

Spareka’s customers have already avoided the emission of 31 500 tonnes of CO2 through 750 000 diagnostics and more than 25 million video tutorials.

Since its creation, the startup's customers have already saved 418 million euros by repairing objects instead of throwing them away. Worldwide, the mass of electrical and electronic waste amounted to 44,7 million in 2016. In the future, Spareka intends to allow the repair of 5 million devices worldwide per year, including 500 000 in France.

"If we have not questioned this investment during this period of quarantine, it is because Spareka's prospects are driven by rapidly growing demand responding to major ecological, economic and social challenges. The development of the company should not be hampered by the current crisis, but on the contrary, it highlights the importance of doing it yourself. This is even more glaring in this period of quarantine where consumers are stranded at home, with no choice but to be independent and learn to do it themselves. We have to keep moving forward! " explains Jean-Charles Scatena, Partner at Demeter.