Vanilla Steel raises $4M in seed funding led by June Fund.

Vanilla Steel, a Berlin, Germany-based startup building a marketplace for trading steel, announced completing a $4 million seed funding round.

The money was raised from backers led by the German investors from June Fund, joined by existing investors such as Seedcamp and Mustard Seed Maze.

Vanilla Steel, founded in 2020 by Alexis Ducros, Clifford Ondara, Matthias Affeldt and Simon Zühlke, is building a secondary market for excess steel, material that is in overstock and has no direct customer attached to it. Vanilla Steel facilitates transactions, enables smart matchmaking, removes manual and tedious tasks with automation and saves time by reducing the negotiation period.

Through weekly online auctions, steel suppliers can find the right buyers in a competitive bidding process. Vanilla Steel says it is already present in 50 countries with more than 100 steel suppliers who have listed 90,000 tons of steel during its first year of operation.