Catawiki
👤 René Schoenmakers & Marco Jansen (Schoenmakers, a comic collector, built a wiki catalogue for collectors first - then turned that trusting audience into auctions.)🌐 site
A curated marketplace for collectibles - watches, art, jewelry - where in-house experts vet every lot before auction.
Will it work? · our read
Curation wins. Vetting every lot built real trust and a 21.5% take - but the same experts who create the moat also cap the margin, so 16 years in it still sits near breakeven.
01How the money moves
Seller submits a special object to auction
→
An in-house expert vets, prices, and lists it
→
It sells - Catawiki takes 12.5% + a fixed fee from the seller, plus a 9% + €3 Buyer Protection fee from the buyer
02The numbers
€105MStated2024 revenue (about $114M)
2024
the sentence on the page
its FY24 results, reporting revenue crossing the €100 million mark for the first time and reaching €105M — up 8% year-on-year ● Adjusted EBITDA improved significantly to €-0.46M (2023: €-8.0M), with…
GMV is about $770M (2024, ECDB estimate) - the €105M is Catawiki's commission cut, not GMV. Catawiki 2024 results
2024 revenue €105M (about $114M), up 8% YoY - it took 16 years to cross that mark, and it ran near breakeven until 2025, when it posted its first real profit.
🔒
You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
- The case against our own call
- A 🚀 launchpad prompt — the case, as a plan for your business
We rate our own confidence — and argue against ourselves. Nobody else in this category does.
Sources always public on all 560 cases · cancel anytime · 14-day refund
See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 5 August 2026
Catawiki: 2024 revenue crossed €100M, reaching €105M (about $114M)Catawiki announces 2023 results (€98M revenue)Wikipedia: Catawiki - founding, funding, expert modelPermira: Catawiki reports first profits (2020)Catawiki: how selling works (12.5% seller + 9% buyer fees)
Revenue (€105M, 2024, about $114M) is first-party from Catawiki's own press release, and verified. The 12.5% seller + 9% buyer fee split is from Catawiki's own help pages. GMV (about $770M) is a third-party ECDB estimate, clearly labelled and not counted as revenue. '240+ experts' is Wikipedia; the 2024 release says 'hundreds.' The margin-ceiling read and the 'dies' scenario are [our read], not company claims. We never score you.