Bigcommerce, a company that provides e-commerce software to online retailers and merchants, has raised $40 million from Revolution Growth, the firm founded by former AOL CEO Steve Case. As part of the funding, Case will join the Bigcommerce board. This new round will bring the company’s total funding to $75 million.
Launched in 2009, Bigcommerce provides a comprehensive SaaS for retailers and merchants to manage e-commerce online. Bigcommerce helps small businesses power anything and everything related to an online storefront from search to inventory to online payments to marketing and SEO. Features include multi-channel retailing, automated email marketing, inventory control, an online storefront, and more. The company has 35,000 clients and was profitable as of last year.
As founders Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper explain, for as little as $25 a month merchants can set up a storefront and make their first sale within 48 hours. As ecommerce continues to grow in an Amazon-dominated world, Bigcommerce wants to be the layer for SMBs to operate a various sales channels. So a merchant could sell on Amazon, and eBay but have Bigcommerce be the platform from which they sell these goods.
“Bigcommerce is the big equalizer,” Case said of the company. “Now every entrepreneur can have Amazon-like e-commerce capabilities, in hours – not months or years.”
This is Revolution Growth largest investment to date. Case explains further in an interview that he found Bigcommerce to be an attractive investment because it has the potential to be a billion dollar global platform. “This is the bottom of the first inning for Bigcommerce, and this next era is where we can be helpful with partnerships and more.”
Machaalani says that the company is focusing on making Bigcommerce the go-to platform for merchants to access all retail channels. The startup is also focused on expanding the developers building off the platform. Last year, Bigcommerce set up a $2 million fund to support third-party developers for submitting their integration and application ideas for Web, mobile or desktop apps that make use of the Bigcommerce API.
To date, Bigcommerce has taken 17 million orders and powered $2 billion in online sales. The company says revenue has nearly doubled each year. In 2013, the company launched over 30 new app integrations (now with over 100 apps like Mailchimp, HubSpot and SumAll).
The new funding will used to further expand the platform, product development, brand awareness and international expansion.
While it’s still early days in Bigcommerce’s future, it should be interesting to see if it follows in the path of newly public Channeladvisor, which provides ecommerce software to companies.