Vivino
Vivino is a wine rating app and marketplace with 280M+ ratings and 700+ merchant partners.
On the record
Checkpoint: Next funding round or acquisition signal, none since Feb 2021 Series D
The call
Vivino still runs the marketplace people buy through, but the scan-and-discover habit that built its audience is moving into AI chat windows it does not own.
Vivino is a wine marketplace where people scan bottle labels to get ratings, recommendations, and buy wine online. The problem is that ChatGPT, Google, Apple, and Amazon now offer the same label-scanning and wine advice for free, built directly into phones, so users don't need Vivino's app anymore. The company's traffic has dropped 25% in a year, it hasn't raised money since 2021, and it hasn't hired since 2024. The one thing that could save Vivino is if people keep using its checkout to actually buy wine even after they stop using the app to get recommendations, turning it into a behind-the-scenes payment system rather than a destination app.
Why
01
AI pressure: ChatGPT Shopping Research, Apple Intelligence, Gemini on Pixel, Perplexity checkout. Diners now photograph wine lists into ChatGPT instead of scanning them in Vivino, per Wine Spectator, Nov 2025. Could AI do the core job? Yes, likely.
02
Bigger players: Amazon (Rufus AI shopping assistant), Total Wine, Wine.com. Amazon's Rufus and big retailers add AI recommendation layers on top of purchase data Vivino cannot match at scale. Could a giant copy it? Yes, easily.
03
What protects it. 700+ merchant checkout partners and 15 years of scan data give it real transaction rails, not just an app.
What would change this call
Vivino's monthly web traffic trend in coming SimilarWeb-type reports. Continued decline from the 6.4M to 4.82M drop would show users are shifting discovery to AI chat tools.
Whether Vivino announces a new funding round or acquisition within 12 months. A raise or sale after 5+ years without funding would show investor view on its standalone viability.
Whether Vivino's marketplace GMV keeps growing while app traffic falls. Decoupled growth would show it surviving as a checkout layer even as scanning use declines.
Whether Vivino announces a new funding round or acquisition within 12 months. A raise or sale after 5+ years without funding would show investor view on its standalone viability.
Whether Vivino's marketplace GMV keeps growing while app traffic falls. Decoupled growth would show it surviving as a checkout layer even as scanning use declines.
Key numbers
- Web traffic down 25%, 6.4M to 4.82M monthly visits
- Headcount flat at ~297 for two years
- ~$491M estimated gross online sales
Named risks
- Core scan-and-recommend feature being replicated free by OS-level AI and chatbots.
- Web traffic decline of ~25% year over year (Oct 2024 to Nov 2025) signals active user disintermediation.
- No funding round since Feb 2021, over 5 years, limiting capital for competitive response.
- Flat headcount and low growth score (10/100) suggest stalled expansion.
- Proprietary taste-preference data advantage eroding as users feed preferences directly into LLM memory features.
Rivals, as read in July 2026
| Rival | Direction | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT (OpenAI) | losing to | Diners photographed wine lists into ChatGPT instead of Vivino at a Chicago restaurant, Nov 2025 |
| Amazon Rufus | losing to | Rufus AI assistant cited by Amazon CEO as lifting purchase completion 60%, Q3 2025 earnings |
| Perplexity | losing to | Perplexity added native checkout Nov 2024 and reached ~30M monthly users by mid-2025 |
| Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini, Samsung Galaxy AI | losing to | On-device visual AI can identify wine labels directly, shipped by 2026 |
| Total Wine and More | contesting | Named a closest competitor in wine e-commerce category, per Crustdata, June 2026 |
| CellarTracker | contesting | Direct competitor in cellar-tracking and rating space, per PitchBook profile |
Questions people ask
- Is Vivino profitable in 2026?
- No public profitability figures exist. Vivino is privately held with no confirmed profit disclosure; e-commerce tracker ECDB estimated ~$491M gross online sales in 2025, but headcount has been flat since 2021 and no new funding round has closed since Feb 2021, suggesting the company is not scaling aggressively.
- Is Vivino losing users to ChatGPT?
- There is documented evidence of substitution. Wine Spectator reported in November 2025 that restaurant diners were photographing wine lists into ChatGPT instead of using Vivino, and Vivino's web traffic fell about 25% year over year, from 6.4M monthly visits in Oct 2024 to 4.82M in Nov 2025.
- Who owns Vivino?
- Vivino is privately held and venture-backed, founded in 2010 in Copenhagen by Heini Zachariassen and Theis Søndergaard. Its last disclosed funding round was a $155M Series D in February 2021 led by Kinnevik and Sprints Capital, bringing total disclosed funding to roughly $221M. No IPO or acquisition has occurred as of July 2026.
- Could AI replace Vivino's core app?
- Vivino's scan-a-label-get-a-rating workflow is being directly replicated by on-device AI (Apple Intelligence, Gemini on Pixel, Galaxy AI) and chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity, which added shopping and checkout features in Nov 2025 and Nov 2024 respectively. A November 2025 Wine Spectator account documented real diners switching to ChatGPT over Vivino at the table.
- Is joining Vivino as an employee safe right now?
- Headcount has been essentially flat at roughly 297-306 employees since January 2024, with a growth score of just 10/100 per Crustdata (as of June 2026), and no funding round since Feb 2021, over 5 years, indicating stagnation rather than active layoffs as of July 2026.
- Who is Vivino's biggest competitor?
- Crustdata (June 2026) names Total Wine & More, Wine.com, Wine Enthusiast, and Wine-Searcher as closest competitors, while PitchBook cites CellarTracker for cellar-tracking. The bigger structural threat is AI shopping assistants: Amazon's Rufus, ChatGPT Shopping Research, and Perplexity's native checkout.
Timeline
- 2026-05-31Flagship Vivino Wine Shop opens in Singapore at Raffles City and Novena Square
- 2026-02-10Vivino partners with Shell convenience stores and Deliveroo in Singapore for curated wine
- 2025-11-24ChatGPT Shopping Research launches, competing with Vivino's discovery function
- 2025-11Wine Spectator reports diners using ChatGPT instead of Vivino to scan wine lists
- 2025Vivino launches AI-model-supported personalized wine recommendation feature
- 2024-01Vivino headcount peaks at approximately 306 employees
- 2021-06-08Olivier Gremillon named Vivino CEO, replacing co-founder Heini Zachariassen
- 2021-02-05Vivino raises $155M Series D led by Kinnevik and Sprints Capital
- 2018-02Vivino closes $20M Series C led by SCP Neptune
- 2010Vivino founded in Copenhagen by Heini Zachariassen and Theis Sondergaard
Revision history
23 July 2026
First assessed. Protection under test. The text above is fixed as of this date and is not edited afterwards.
In the same band
Sources
- Vivino
- Vivino, "Netflix for wine", raises $155m (2021-02-05)
- Vivino - Headcount, Funding & Open Jobs (2026-06-23)
- What wine and beer platforms teach us about defensibility in the AI era (2026-04-21)
- Vivino is the wine industry's most powerful app (2026-05-20)
- Download the Vivino App
- Vivino Company & Revenue 2015-2027 (2026-07-02)
- Vivino appoints Olivier Grémillon as new CEO (2021-06-08)
- About Vivino
- Vivino's App to Identify Wine Labels (2026-07-06)
- Vivino Employee Directory, Headcount & Staff (2026-06-03)
- Products, Competitors, Financials, Employees, Headquarters Locations (2026-02-10)