Wine recommendation app Vivino raises $155m, with hints of a marketplace to come

There’s been a pretty unmissable trend over the past decade: people rudely interrupting restaurant meals by snapping photos of the wine bottle.

We can all blame Vivino, the wine recommendation app that just raised $155m (per TechCrunch) to keep you snapping wine labels.

The numbers from Vivino’s website are impressive:

• User base: 50m (from 29m in 2018)
• User-generated insights: 190m+ ratings and 67m reviews
• Database: 1.5B user-submitted pictures for 13m types of wine (probably the world’s largest aggregated wine database)

When you have this type of juicy data, you don’t eff around.

Sure enough, Vivino will be using the funds (and data) to build out its marketplace. With a big audience in hand, Vivino can become the leading wine ecommerce platform.

It’s still very early days for the firm: It has 200 employees and sells wine in only 17 countries… which means there will be many more dinner interruptions to come.