Wedding startup Zola raises $100M

Airbnb in travel, Uber Technologies in transportation, Zillow Group in real estate: Most industries have been changed dramatically by tech startups in recent years. Now Zola just tied the knot on a big financing round to try to do the same for the costly and complex business of weddings.

The startup, led by former Gilt Groupe executive Shan-Lyn Ma, said Thursday it raised $100 million from investors including Comcast and Goldman Sachs. The deal values Zola at about $600 million, according to a person familiar with the deal.

Founded in 2013, Zola runs an online wedding registry that lets couples see what guests have bought them before the gifts are delivered, letting them swap out unwanted items and avoid the hassle and cost of returns. Ma said she wants to build more products to become the dominant company in what Zola estimates is a $100 billion market.

“Today a couple has to use probably 20 different products or apps or services,” Ma said. “Some of these products aren’t even designed for wedding planning and some of them were designed a decade ago. It shouldn’t be that way.”

The roughly $600 million valuation would make Zola worth around the same as XO Group, a publicly traded company founded in the late 1990s that runs wedding-planning websites and a marketplace for wedding services. Much of the rest of the industry is fragmented.

The round, led by Comcast’s venture capital unit, brings Zola’s total funding to about $140 million. Lightspeed and Thrive Capital also participated.

“Unlike most e-commerce businesses, I would say it features a handful of really attractive attributes,” said Ian Friedman, who led Goldman Sachs’ investment in the deal.

Zola can predict how much of a certain product it needs to order well in advance, because people fill out registries weeks, if not months, ahead of a wedding. The company avoids most returns, or what Friedman calls “the silent killer of retail,” by letting couples switch out things they don’t want. And Zola doesn’t carry inventory risk by stocking up items in its own warehouses.