Mondus.com raises funds for SME ecommerce portal

Mondus.com an ecommerce start-up based in Oxford, has raised $12m from Eden Capital. Mondus.com acts as a bidding mechanism between small businesses and their suppliers. Type in a purchase request and within hours you can get competing bids from various suppliers. Through Mondus, suppliers can reduce the costs of finding new customers. This is a neat idea -- and one that The Register could envisage using (depending of course on how well Mondus.com executes its service). Our editorial assistant spends far too much time fending off sales calls from office equipment and stationery suppliers. And we don't spend enough money with these suppliers to make it worth our while ensuring that we get anything like best pricing. Mondus.com launches in the US on September 2 and in October in the UK and Germany. The founders Alexander Straub and Rouzbeh Pirouz sound like seriously brainy people, judging from the FT report. They are both former Oxford Rhodes Scholars (just like Bill Clinton) and they set up their company in March after winning a venture capital competition run by 3i, Their prize for beating 1,600 entrants was £1m worth of first-round funding. 3i has an 18 per cent stake, Eden holds 15 per cent, workers 20 per cent, and the co-founders 21 per cent apiece. Oh, there's a mystery shareholder who owns the remaining one per cent of the company. ® Daily Net finance news from The Register