According to a regulatory filing, LA-based Magento Commerce, which develops an open source e-commerce software suite, has recently received a $22.5 million capital injection in an equity funding round.
Magento was originally a product developed and marketed by Varien, a 9-year old company that also delivers e-commerce business consulting and other services, but has now effectively been incorporated as a stand-alone venture. It’s unclear whether the financing of Magento comes from Varien, or if the latter company’s existing and / or other investors have stepped in to provide funding. Either way, the company says it concerns ‘fresh’ cash.
If I were to venture a guess, I would say PayPal plays a part in this story – from what I can gather the least you can say is that the digital payment company has a deep partnership with Magento that spans both co-marketing of their respective services as well as a collaboration on a product development level.
I had a brief chat with Tim Schulz, the former MySpace product manager who recently became Magento’s Senior Product Manager, who told me they’re positioning the Magento Commerce solution right in the center of various growth areas in electronic commerce and that its goal is to become the provider of the single largest e-commerce platform in the world. Bonus points for showcasing some ambition.
Magento currently has over 60,000 merchants using its software, which was downloaded about 1.5 million times as of January 2010. The company also says they’ve registered over $15 billion in transactions to date. The roadmap for the future is apparently paved with additional products, with a number of “Mobile Commerce, Saas offering and other products/services” coming later this year.
Here’s a video of Varien / Magento CEO Roy Rubin outlining his vision on open source e-commerce:
This is awesome. Magento Rocks!!!
Agree, Paypal should wake its eyes now, seeing that open-source banking isn’t much of a bad idea at all.
We are aggressively hiring in all areas of the business.
Please see the blog post below for more details and get in touch.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/join-the-team-open-positions-at-magento
Regards,
Amit Shah | VP Sales & Business Development
Magento, Inc.
11832 W. Pico Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90064
email | amit.shah@varien.com
http://twitter.com/amitrshah
skype | londonamit
Hey Amit, well done on this big win for the team.
I run a development shop and our client always comment on the aesthetics and usability of their Magento stores, and a lot of our repeat work is customization of your platform so thanks for the hard work and keep it up!
Kamal
Thats a real good news for us.
Magento is one of the greatest examples of for-profit open source business models of the last decade!
I wish them the very best and I hope we will see more of these solid open source initiatives in the future.
Congrats to Roy and a great team, Magento is a fantastic product that we’ve referred to a number of startups.
We just started customizing our Magento theme and we can already tell that it is going to help take our small business to the next level. It has all the tools necessary to manage our products and I’m excited to learn more about the software.
Am I the only 1 that thinks Spree dominates Magento?
The Magento team will have some serious competition will Spree hits 1.0. Of course, I’m sure there’s room enough for 2 major open source ecommerce apps.
I hope they make Magento a lot less server resource hungry. It’s telling that it’s been downloaded 1.5 million times, yet there are only 60,000 active merchant sites.
Yeah, that def ain’t a good stat they should be telling people.
Magento posts once a month about “performance improvements.” But it still crawls.
It’s kinda embarrassing that “performance improvements” are even considered an enhancement. Shouldn’t they have thought about performance from day 1?
Magento is great if you have no clue about how to develop on your own. Of course, if you have no clue, why not just rock Shopify?
I agree with server resource issue, we have done 85+ ecommerce sites mostly on oscommerce/creloaded platform but we like magento and wanted to move many sites, now most clients cant afford dedicated server and it takes so much resource. why cant they come up with less featured version.
I thought this also when I saw that statistic. I have been a project manager on a Magento implementation and though I agree that it is a resource hog, I think the wide difference between the number of downloads and actual stores is that Magento is complicated to implement for the average joe.
Because of the free version that is available, I think many that initially download think it is as easy to implement as say WordPress, but it isn’t. I would also say that many that download it install it on a $6 a month shared hosting account or something, and that is just not going to cut it. So folks like that probably abandon it in high numbers.
Magento is amazingly slow and bloated. Investors should do a bit of technical due dilligence before investing.
Seriously, you’re dead on about that. We looked at Magento that decided Spree.
Spree flies. I’d be kicking myself endlessly if we weren’t using it.
If you haven’t play with it check it out. Just clicking around the demo you can instantly notice the performance difference.
Anthony spree looks very good. we are settling with php after 10 years, how many will learn new programming to switch platform, also with Ruby its still like CF, few developer you can find.
Magento is resource intensive unless you make some modifications to the out-of-the-box download. If you turn on some database caching, enable content caching, and install some extensions, your site can fly.
The extension at http://bit.ly/8ZHGDF is the best I’ve seen. You get page response times of under 200 ms. The folks there are Magento pros.
I have been using from past 2 years for my e-commerce. It is easy to use and works fine.
Congratulations Magento. :)
That sounds like too much cash for this type of company. It’s a decent offering but in a very crowded place with no one making much dough. Miva dominated the market at one point and sold for a couple mill (which was too much!).
Magento liked the ecommerce “reward system” concept that http://www.vyoom.com had, which was about 10 months ago.
Congrats Roy!
Ray – wow! Much deserved.
Roy too
Its a good thing and Congrats to the Magento team.
Tim lets go out to launch, your treat of course
*lunch
damn freud
We run a small shop with Magento on a very modest dedicated server and it runs ok but for sure, performances are really not there.
Also it stills not a lot of work to make it more non-US friendly.
But it still a solid software and with php and Zend Framework you can crawl on the code quickly.
Great stuff! Congrats guys.
!Does anyone know the technical differences between magento and virtuemart ?
Magento deserve their success. This has been a boon for small and medium businesses who wanted a quality ecommerce platform.
Congrats Magento! Looking forward to seeing what’s next for the team.
Congratulations guys! Kudos
I have been a long time fan of Magento and built a few $50M+ sites on it and it is fantastic. It is so much more than a “cart”. My hat is off to this group for the innovation and disruption. Looks like other brands that find ecommerce critical are having success too (Tom Shoes, North Face, Visio, Lenovo, Skull Candy, Xerox, OpenSky….)
If you read the Magento release on the site you can see they are truly thinking in a big way and in an open source way that should be good for everyone “enabling the eCommerce ecosystem”. (but apparently
From Magento Site
http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/magento-secures-its-first-investment/
At Magento we look at everything we do against one measuring stick—“enabling the eCommerce ecosystem”. Today’s announcement that we’ve secured our first investment will further help us all continue to make this come true. While the terms of the deal are confidential, we’re extremely excited about this investment and the capital will give us an even stronger foundation for growth as Magento continues to be adopted Worldwide. Our tremendous growth rate can be seen in our metrics:
Magento has been downloaded over 1.5 million times.
Is in active use by over 60,000 merchants who sell online.
We also now have an active community of over 150,000 members and our forums are visited daily by tens of thousands of developers.
Our passionate users have also translated the product into more than 65 languages.
We now have over 150 partners around the world helping deliver Magento to large and small merchants through the US, Europe & Asia.
Many of the world’s best brands and emerging eCommerce leaders are now running their eCommerce stores on Magento.
…and yes, the word “Magento” is now searched more than “eCommerce” http://tinyurl.com/yd5ofcd
What does it mean to “enable the eCommerce ecosystem”? It’s about building Magento into a company that supports and facilitates the growth and vision of our passionate eCommerce users, developers, partners and merchants around the world.
We have come a long way in a short time and our growth is fantastic. Yet there is no shortage of initiatives that we remain focused on to achieve our goals with and for you, the Magento community.
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Magento is amazingly slow
try opencart! its 10 times better. it easy to code with aswell.
magento is a poorly coded hog!
To all the ones claiming that Magento is slow: That is just not true, apparently you just don't know how to optimize it. Out-of-the box it might not be the fastest, but If you know how to optimize Magento for your environment it will be very quick. I wrote an article about this: "101 ways to speed up your Magento e-commerce website" (http://blog.guidojansen.nl/2010/05/18/101-ways-to-speed-up-your-magento-e-commerce-website/). Read id, apply the tips and Magento will be lightning fast.
The poster above, Daniel Kerr, is the developer of the product he's plugging – Opencart. In case anyone is considering making the big mistake of trying it – DON'T – I've spent quite a lot of my time evaluating it and have concluded that it's an utter piece of junk. The only thing he ever has to say about Magento is that it's slow, probably because in every other way it's infinitely superior to Opencart. The only problem with his argument is that Magento can be made to run lightning fast if you have a sufficient pool of braincells to optimize it. If you don't believe me go check out the Magento demo store – it's a little slower than Opencart but a million times better in every other respect.
The most hilarious thing is he's always whining on his forums about making it profitable and worth his time. A little tip for you Daniel – if Opencart wasn't such a huge steaming pile of shit maybe people would consider supporting it more.