Kivra, the Swedish company that really wants you to get rid of your old fashioned postal mailbox, has just acquired its local competitor Brevo.
While Kivra wants to be the go-to digital mailbox service in Sweden (and beyond) it wasn’t the first – Brevo beat it to the punch by launching in March 2011. However, Kivra’s service followed in its footsteps in January this year, leading to the plucky Swedish startup acquiring its rival.
“The merger of Kivra and Brevo gives us over half a million users and more senders will be added to our service. This will clearly have a positive impact on the market,” said Stefan Krook CEO of Kivra. “This agreement is a milestone in the continuous development of a digital postal mail market in Sweden.”
Indeed, once the merger is complete there will be a userbase of more than half a million people all receiving digital mail in their mailboxes instead of traditional paper ‘snail mail’. This digitization of “window envelopes” equates to an annual saving of around 350,000 trees in Sweden alone, Kivra said.
For now, however, the two services will remain separate with integration of Brevo’s list of senders to begin “in the fall”. Brevo’s users aren’t expected to be transferred across to the Kivra platform until the first half of next year, Kivra said.
While financial details of the deal are unknown, Kivra secured $2 million in funding at the end of last year which must have gone some way to growing the service rapidly enough to acquire its key competitor in the market.
Unlike email, Kivra is intended to be a secure place to store important documents that would normally be sent out on paper. To use the service, users simply create an account and receive a secure code for access which they then use online or on the iOS app.
While the digital mailbox service currently only operates in Sweden, it has expressed intentions for expansion in the future.
A number of other digital secure mailbox services already operate in other parts of the world, such as Zumbox and Doxo in the US and e-boks in Denmark, which could well make Kivra’s expansion ambitions all the harder.
Image Credit - AFP/Getty Images
➤ Kivra
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Swedish digital mailbox service Kivra acquires local rival Brevo
