A start-up which raised hundreds of millions of pounds to buy digital brands such as the children’s luggage manufacturer Trunki is itself exploring a sale.

Sky News has learnt that Heroes, one of a breed of companies set up to acquire third-party Amazon Marketplace merchants, is working with bankers at Houlihan Lokey on options including an outright sale.

Sources said on Wednesday that Heroes was working with its advisers to examine a range of options, and that it had approached a range of potential debt and equity investors.

A sale of the company was not certain to be its shareholders’ preferred option, the sources added.

The process being run by Houlihan Lokey is understood to include bankers from its restructuring advisory team.

Heroes was founded as an aggregator business and positions itself as the home of brands “loved by families worldwide”.

In addition to Trunki, which it acquired last year from BGF, the high street bank-backed investor, Heroes owns Cherish, a maker of products for babies and young infants, and Baby Uma, which sells pushchair accessories.

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Heroes was founded by brothers Alessio and Riccardo Bruni in 2020.

Brand aggregator platforms such as Heroes performed strongly during the pandemic, although many have since struggled.

Fuel Ventures, one of Heroes’ principal investors, has publicised two previous funding rounds for the company totalling $265m (£210m).

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The more recent of these was in the summer of 2021, when Fuel Ventures founder Mark Pearson posted on LinkedIn that Heroes had raised “a whopping $200m to accelerate its successful e-commerce roll-up strategy”.

It is unclear how much of the $265m was raised as debt and how much as equity.

Heroes’ other investors include US-based Crayhill Capital Management.

Both Heroes and Houlihan Lokey declined to comment.

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