Wine Merchants Across The UK Are Collaborating With Disruptive Tech Startup That Wants To Be The Amazon Of Wine

A confident founding team with a simple business idea that executes fast and well can go a long way.

In early 2015 Londoner Tai Alegbe and a friend were discussing his friend's decision to go on a "booze cruise", visiting a few vineyards in France and bringing back as many bottles as his car boot would allow. To Tai, it sounded romantic, so he was surprised that neither his friend or their partner were looking forward to it at all. "All that driving, the cost of the petrol, it's killing me man".

It got Alegbe, a wine buff himself having studied for a WSET Certificate and actively looking at ways to get more involved in the industry, thinking. Why couldn't his friend buy the wines online? He searched for some of the bottles his friend mentioned, and he tracked them down to an independent, emerging wine merchant in the UK. A few weeks later he launched Baacco, an online marketplace for wine lovers.

Alegbe comes from an entrepreneurial family. His parents and his twin brother were making a living founding and running businesses. So why couldn't he?

"Marketplaces are eating the world", he says, and he's right. Talk of digital disruption in today's world is cheap but besides social networking and its raison d'etre, advertising, the Internet does 2 things exceptionally well; ecommerce and price comparison. Know this, and you are halfway to success.

Fortunately, Alegbe had the right contacts and was able to put together a founding team with a wealth of experience, including two ex-Just Eat technical engineers and an ex Open Table employee, with years of experience operating digital marketplaces.

Alegbe himself cut his teeth as a derivates trader in the City of London, at the same firm as Ryan Shaw, founder of Shoreditch Vape. Together they have formed a What's App group of young, hungry entrepreneurs, encouraging each other to push the envelope and demand more from themselves.

Baacco targets smaller wine merchants whose online presence is relatively minor, unlikely to be found by the casual browser looking for their next bottle of something other than what's on offer at their local supermarket, or tired of trips to Majestic to pick up the same old vintages they've bought before.

The plan is simple – to aggregate a list of the UK's best independent wine merchants and list their products for sale. When a purchase is made, Baacco pays the merchants using its proprietary fulfilment system and the merchants arrange delivery (although as things progress Baacco say they may well take more responsibility for aggregating deliveries also). The merchant pays a small commission to Baacco each time a sale is made; a small price to pay for listing on a site that pitches them into a much larger marketplace, using powerful SEO techniques and aggregation to create what the founders hope will become an instantly recognisable brand.

Baacco are at pains to execute in traditional startup style. After spending time on the Oxygen and Mass Challenge accelerator programs (where they still use the free office space) the team have developed an algorithmic search engine they call "Decanter".

Another algorithm geared towards personalising the customer experience? "It's even more clever than that", says Alegbe. It takes the hassle out of searching and promotes the brands the customer is most likely to want to buy based on their browsing habits. No off-putting surveys which "only take 10 minutes" to complete.

Currently customers can choose from nearly 15,000 bottles of wine from 60 merchants, but Alegbe says "we should reach the 50,000 bottle mark in the next couple of weeks." He has just been on the phone with a large merchant who want to launch their new Champagne brand on the site, he tells me.

Time is of the essence; "we are very confident we're onto a good thing here", Alegbe says. Surprisingly, despite the fact that the global wine industry is twice the size of the music industry there is no Amazon or Alibaba for wine lovers. Apple Wines, anyone?

Alegre admits to being delighted to have found a gap in the market as "obvious as this one; there are some competitors out there and so to an extent it's a race against time, but it's about making sure we are doing things properly. We've got the right experience, our team has a proven track record in making online marketplaces work, and not just any platform but a unicorn like Just Eat. We've taken some private investment from friends and family and we're looking to wrap up a seed round later in the year".

"It's a technical challenge first and foremost", he continues, "we've made sales from day 1 and the merchants we talk to can see the opportunity – they don't take much convincing – now we need to build out the platform, add features, and make sure we give the customer the best service we can."

Alegbe's excitement and mantra that "we are onto a good thing here", is contagious. The company has, he says, achieved a pre-money valuation of £1m. He has no hesitation in challenging Baacco to be London's next food and drink Unicorn. No doubt he'll be keeping his twin and his WhatsApp group updated on progress, although, as he puts it, "it's a team effort - I'm lucky to be working with such amazing co-founders."

It does seem like a corking opportunity; so raise a glass to Tai and the team. And if you don't have a bottle handy, you know where to look.