Anthony Connelly used to say “neato” a lot sarcastically as a kid. Now his Las Vegas-based Neato is fast becoming a serious player in the e-commerce ecosystem.
A second-party e-commerce accelerator that partners with consumer brands as their exclusive online retailer, Neato raised $25 million in growth capital in April led by Advantage Capital through the Nevada New Markets Jobs Act.
The investment helped fund Neato’s new company headquarters and operations hub that opened last week in a 55,000-square-foot facility near Harry Reid International Airport at 750 Pilot Road.
“We wanted to expand. We built out, I call it, a semi-automatic packaging facility,” said Connelly, an Ohio native who has lived in Las Vegas for more than 20 years. “We are trying to provide as much value as possible by bringing to the digital shelf lower-cost bundles and multi-packs that people can stock their pantry with.”
The company also plans to build an operations hub in Chicago by the end of the year.
“The facility expansion is by far the most important thing. We’re heavily investing in infrastructure to be able to continue to support this,” Connelly said. “We’re branching out to build a platform business, not just Amazon. It’s going to be all marketplaces. Currently we’re on 11 marketplaces worldwide, Walmart included, and all the Amazon European marketplaces.
“The goal is to eventually expand into TikTok, which is our next venture. I’m building the only TikTok live studio in Las Vegas in our warehouse. Long term, if the money gets stretched far enough, we’d love to get into the Far East marketplaces as well.”
Neato pioneered second-party commerce starting in 2020. It buys inventory directly from brands and manages the full lifecycle of selling it online, from advertising to logistics to brand protection.
“We built a business basically predicated on helping brands grow on Amazon, by buying and selling their products,” Connelly said. “We essentially purchase the product at a wholesale margin and we mark it up to a retail cost and we keep the spread. We basically settle in as their major retailer.”
Neato manages a portfolio of large consumer packaged goods brands, including pet, hard goods, grocery, beauty, supplements and personal care. The company primarily works with upper-middle-market to pre-enterprise brands.
“The e-commerce enablement sector is at an inflection point,” Philip Ruppel, principal at Advantage Capital, said in a statement. “Capital is flowing toward operators that align their economics with brand success rather than extracting fees from complexity. Neato’s 2P model, combined with their expansion beyond Amazon into other channels, positions them at the center of where marketplace commerce is heading.”
Connelly, who co-founded Neato with company President Spencer Jacobs, moved to Las Vegas after college and fell in love with the city.
“There’s no other place I’d want to be besides Las Vegas,” he said. “Nevada is probably the most business-friendly state in the union, both with tax law and the ease of starting a business here.”
Neato was listed in the top 500 of the annual Inc. 5000 list ranking the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. in 2023, when it was listed as the fastest-growing company in Clark County and third overall.
The company eclipsed 100 employees on Monday after starting with six and Connelly said it is most likely hiring at any given time.
“We’re probably going to grow about 100 percent this year based on the new investment, year over year growth,” he said.
The company also does volunteer events on a monthly basis and donates product to animal shelters and food banks through its philanthropic arm.
Contact reporter Todd Dewey at tdewey@reviewjournal.com. Follow @tdewey33 on X.
