This startup makes thrifting furniture far easier, even for big retailers like Pottery Barn
Furniture waste is a growing concern as consumers and companies seek to reduce carbon emissions. In the U.S. alone, we throw out roughly 12 million tons of furniture every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, leaving it to rot in landfills. Most of it is less than fifteen years old. Recycling furniture can be difficult, mostly because selling and moving it is such a pain.
Apparel companies like Poshmark, Dpop and Thredup are thriving in online thrifting, but furniture thrifting is a lot more complicated, simply due to the size of the items. Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace list furniture, but it’s up to the consumers to figure out how to pick up and deliver the items. That can be costly and potentially dangerous, with strangers inviting strangers into their homes.
AptDeco is offering a new business model. The New York-based startup is an online marketplace for buying and selling used furniture that provides pick-up and delivery for items. It also works with major retailers, like West Elm and Pottery Barn, to sell floor models or resell items that have been returned.
“By extending the lifecycle of furniture, overall it’s just better for the environment, whether it be less wood being chopped out of forests to just the supply chain associated with producing that furniture,” said Reham Fagiri, founder and CEO of AptDeco.
For big furniture retailers, there is big waste in returns and the reverse logistics involved — from the costs to the transportation emissions. Instead, partner brands are now selling their returned items on AptDeco as soon as a customer requests a return, directly from the customer’s home. AptDeco uses its own resale data to price items to sell quickly, often within a week. They can then retrieve the item from the returner’s home and deliver it directly to a resale buyer, bypassing the need to take these returned items to a distribution center first.
Kathleen O’Brien bought her dining room table, TV console and headboard from AptDeco.
“The world is kind of on fire, literally, and so anything that I can do to reduce my own footprint in the world is what I’m trying to do, like in all aspects of my life and furniture specifically,” said O’Brien.
While the furniture sells at as much as a 50% discount to new, the service comes at a price.
“We earn a percentage that ranges from 15% to as high as 60% depending on the product, the brand, the condition, and a lot of different variations that go into it,” said Fagiri.
The company operates everywhere in the U.S. except Alaska and Hawaii. The company’s carrier network across so many markets makes its expansion potential very attractive to investors like Initialized Capital.
“Contributing to the circular economy through their logistics business is a great example of the types of climate adaptation companies that we see as having longevity in the next phase of climate tech,” said Zoe Perret, a partner at Initialized Capital,
AptDeco is also backed by Comcast Ventures, Y Combinator, Hearst Lab, Great Oaks Venture Capital and Soma Capital. It has raised $14.5 million in total funding so far.
In the 10 years since its launch, Fagiri says the company has offset over 19 million pounds of carbon dioxide from the environment. That’s equivalent to roughly 6.5 million cars taken off the road.
CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.
Anthony Denier, CEO fo Webull, speaks during an interview on CNBC on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., June 1, 2022.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Shares of Webull soared nearly 375% on Monday, the second day on the market for the stock-trading app, which completed its merger last week with SK Growth Opportunities Corp., a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
The rally gives Webull a market cap of almost $30 billion.
Webull competes with Robinhood, Charles Schwab and E-Trade. The app lets investors buy and sell shares and options in individual securities, exchange-traded funds and cryptocurrencies, and offers charts, watchlists, screening tools and paper trading.
The company says it has over 23 million registered users and operates in 15 regions globally. In addition to charging fees on trades, Webull has a premium tier with real-time data that costs $40 per year.
In an investor presentation last month, the company said it was expecting $390.2 million in 2024 revenue, which would be roughly flat from 2023.
Former Alibaba and Xiaomi manager Wang Anquan founded Webull in 2016, and he remains the company’s global CEO. Investors include Coatue, General Atlantic and Lightspeed. The app gained popularity during the Covid pandemic, as U.S. citizens used stimulus checks to invest, Anthony Denier, the company’s group president and U.S. CEO, told CNBC in 2021. Webull users are “much more intellectual” than Robinhood’s, Denier has said.
In November, the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent a letter to Denier inquiring about the company’s ties to China. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The rise of blank-check companies such as SK Growth Opportunities peaked in 2021, with 613 IPOs completed, according to SPAC Insider. The market fell apart the following year as soaring inflation and rising interest rates pushed investors out of risky assets. So far this year there have been 23 SPAC IPOs.
Webull said last year that it was planning for its market debut to take place in the second half of 2024.
WATCH: House Committee slams Webull over alleged ties to Chinese Communist Party
Apple CEO Tim Cook greets former President Barack Obama at the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson | Getty Images
Apple shares rose more than 2% on Monday, pushing the company’s market cap back above $3 trillion, as Wall Street expressed some level of relief that the iPhone maker will be able to withstand President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs.
Late Friday, the Trump administration announced that phones, computers and chips were exempted from new tariffs. Apple is among the most exposed companies to Trump’s tariffs because the majority of its iPhones, iPads and MacBooks are manufactured in China and other Asian countries. Trump has called for Apple to make its products in the U.S.
Most of Apple’s critical imports were exempted from the tariffs, a move that Wall Street analysts said could save Apple billions in costs. However, administration officials warned over the weekend that the exemptions were temporary and could change over the coming weeks.
“I speak to Tim Cook. I helped Tim Cook, recently, and that whole business,” Trump said Monday in a briefing with reporters in the Oval Office, referring to Apple’s CEO. “I don’t want to hurt anybody, but the end result is we’re going to get to the position of greatness for our country.”
Uncertainty about what the future holds helps explain Apple’s relatively muted gain on Friday. The stock is still down almost 9% in April after falling more than 8% in March. The 11% drop in the first quarter marked Apple’s worst performance since 2023.
Apple is the most valuable publicly traded U.S. company once again, edging out Microsoft.
Apple fell below the $3 trillion mark on April 4, two days after Trump announced “reciprocal tariffs” that would place significant duties on China and countries where the company does manufacturing.
The stock rallied last week after Trump announced his administration was dropping new tariff rates to 10% on imports from countries other than China, which would face tariffs as high as 145%.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley wrote in a note Monday that the latest news from the White House brings Apple’s “annualized tariff cost burden” to $7 billion, down from $44 billion as of Thursday.
Technology
Meta resorted to ‘buy-or-bury scheme’ with Instagram and WhatsApp deals, former FTC Chair Lina Khan says
Former U.S. Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan said Monday that Facebook “panicked” when making the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp as smartphone use took off.
“It saw companies like Instagram and WhatsApp experiencing astronomical growth, and that’s the point at which it resorted to this buy-or-bury scheme where, if it couldn’t outcompete a rival, it either bought them out or cut them off its network,” Khan said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, begins a trial with the FTC on Monday. The government alleges that the company monopolized the personal social networking market with its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp in 2014.
Meta did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The trial could result in the social media giant divesting the two companies. Meta has filed a pretrial brief detailing its disagreement with the FTC and reiterating that it believes the company does not have a monopoly.
“There’s no expiration date when it comes to the illegality of the transaction,” Khan said. “I think there is a way in which the entire social networking ecosystem looks different today because Facebook was permitted to go out and make these acquisitions.”
The case is, at its core, about “free and fair trade,” Khan added. Though no settlement has been reached, she said there’s always a possibility of a settlement before the case concludes.
With President Donald Trump regularly holding court with tech executives, Khan said she’s “glad” that Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg‘s efforts to dismiss the case have been, thus far, unsuccessful.
Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, co-hosted an inaugural ball and has reportedly met with the president multiple times since January.
“Until the trial is over and until we actually get a liability verdict and then a remedy, we’re all going to have to wait and see,” Khan said.
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business3 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway