Razor Group GmbH is a Berlin-based acquirer and operator of consumer brands sold predominantly through Amazon and other digital marketplaces. The company was founded in 2020 by Tushar Ahluwalia, Christoph Fuelleborn and Oliver Dlouhy, riding the rapid post-pandemic wave of Amazon-aggregator capital that produced peers Thrasio, Berlin Brands Group, SellerX, Heyday and Branded.
Razor raised in excess of one billion dollars in equity and structured-debt facilities through a series of rounds led by Black Rock, L Catterton, Fortress Investment Group, Upper90 and Victory Park Capital, becoming one of the most heavily capitalized European players in the category.
In 2024 Razor merged with Perch, the Boston-based aggregator backed by SoftBank and Spark Capital, in a transaction that combined the two largest aggregators outside Thrasio and created one of the largest Amazon-native consumer-brand portfolios globally.
The combined group operates several hundred brands across home, kitchen, beauty, sports, baby and outdoors categories, supported by central technology, finance, marketing and supply-chain functions in Berlin and Boston. Razor Group has been an aggressive consolidator of distressed competitors as the aggregator category contracted from its 2021 peak, and presents itself as the survivor-platform for category roll-up.
Razor Group is one of the cleanest illustrations of why a Berlin acquirer of dozens of operating businesses needs a multi-layer Luxembourg-plus-GmbH structure rather than a single German entity.
The German operating parent is Razor Group GmbH, registered at the Amtsgericht Charlottenburg in the Berlin Handelsregister B section, with the standard 25,000 euro minimum share capital and notarized articles of association under the GmbH-Gesetz.
Each acquired Amazon-native brand is held in its own Berlin or local operating subsidiary, sometimes a German UG or GmbH and sometimes a foreign entity in the United States, the United Kingdom or Asia depending on supplier and marketplace footprint.
Sitting above the German operating layer is a Luxembourg holding parent that anchors the cap table for Black Rock, L Catterton, Fortress and the senior structured-debt facilities; this layer is critical because much of Razor's capital stack is debt rather than equity, and Luxembourg SARL law accommodates secured debt with multi-currency tranches more flexibly than German GmbH practice.
The 2024 Perch merger was effected at the Luxembourg holding-parent level, folding the Perch entities under the Razor SARL and aligning the combined cap table under a single English-language governing law. Mittelstand governance norms are largely irrelevant; Razor runs a venture-and-private-equity-style supervisory board with investor, lender and operator representatives.
BaFin is not in scope because Razor sells consumer goods rather than financial services, but DSGVO compliance, Amazon marketplace agreements and product-safety regimes such as the General Product Safety Regulation are central.
If Razor reaches a public exit, the IPO path will likely involve a Luxembourg listed parent or a US-listed holding rather than a German AG conversion, mirroring what Berlin Brands Group and SellerX have signalled.
Razor's capital structure includes substantial structured-debt tranches alongside equity, and Luxembourg SARL law accommodates multi-currency, multi-tranche secured debt with collateral packages over equity and IP more flexibly than German GmbH practice.
The Luxembourg layer also gives Black Rock, L Catterton and Fortress a single English-language governing law for cap-table and intercreditor documentation, while each German GmbH or UG subsidiary continues to own its acquired brand's contracts, employees and inventory under local German law.
The merger was effected at the Luxembourg holding-parent level, with Perch entities folded under the Razor SARL through a share-for-share exchange and certain cash and debt-assumption components. Each side's operating subsidiaries continued under their original local jurisdictions, with central functions consolidated in Berlin and Boston over a roughly twelve-month integration period.
Combining at the holding level rather than at the operating level avoided triggering employee-transfer, supplier-consent and licensing complexities in dozens of operating jurisdictions.
The Razor Group GmbH entry in the Berlin Handelsregister B section discloses the registered seat in Berlin, the share capital, the names of Geschaftsfuhrer, the deposited shareholder list and the notarized articles of association.
Specific commercial terms with investors and lenders are documented in the Luxembourg holding company's shareholder agreements and security packages, which are not part of the German Handelsregister disclosure regime. Both Bundesanzeiger annual filings and selected Handelsregister filings are accessible online.
Possible but not the most likely path. Berlin aggregators with Luxembourg holding parents and US-or-UK-heavy revenue mixes have signalled that a US-listed or Luxembourg-listed parent is more compatible with their investor base than a Frankfurt-listed German AG.
The Umwandlungsgesetz would technically allow the German operating GmbH to convert to an AG and then to an SE, but if Razor reaches a public exit the holding parent will likely be the listing vehicle, with the German GmbH remaining as one operating subsidiary among many.
