OrderWithMe Raises Another $28M To Help Small Businesses Procure Like Big Ones

OrderWithMe, a startup based out of Las Vegas that has built a platform for small businesses to come together to effectively act like big ones to source, order and pay for supplies and components — has raised another $28 million in funding.

The company says the money will be used to build out its operations to new verticals — it has “multiple industry partners lined up” for this already, it says — as well as a new product to add to the chain of services already provided by the startup. OrderWithMe, says CEO Jonathan Jenkins, is planning “to help OrderWithMe’s retailers bring a new consumer experience into brick-and-mortar stores.”

We are reaching out to the company to get more details on the new product.

This latest round of funding was led by the Vegas Tech Fund, SOSVentures, BaseVC and Tony Hsieh; Silicon Valley Bank, Pentland Group, Advantage Capital and several others also participated. To date the company has raised $37 million.

OrderWithMe currently focuses on bringing together businesses with suppliers for eight different verticals that include bike shops, bakeries, children’s stores, photo & printing and plumbing. It doesn’t say how many businesses are a part of its network, but notes that collectively they total more than $3.2 billion in annual purchasing volume. The new verticals will be made public in the next few months.

The thinking here is that if e-commerce companies like Amazon, PayPal, eBay and Alibaba, as well as large brick and mortar chains like Best Buy, have built their businesses out on economies of scale, the same principles of sourcing could help smaller businesses get better deals with suppliers, too. And for the suppliers, especially those based out of China, where OrderWithMe was first founded, trying to connect with some of those smaller businesses is not always that easy.

The company, when still based out of China, was the winner of the TC Disrupt Battlefield in Beijing in 2011. In 2013, perhaps to be closer to the market where its small business retailers are located, it relocated to the U.S. — specifically, Las Vegas, NV. It subsequently announced a $6 million round from Las Vegas regeneration cheerleader Hsieh and the Vegas Tech Fund, among several others.

The company taps into a bigger trend of using the Internet and technology in general to help start and build small businesses (a spirit that is played out in the tech world of startups, which are all, effectively, SMBs in their early days). This has seen the development of a whole range of software, and cloud-based services that bring SMBs on par with how large enterprises do business. OrderWithMe is bringing that to the area of supply chain management and related services.

“OrderWithMe’s first three years were spent identifying the pain points across the entire inventory purchasing and management process and building the technology to help streamline this process,” said Jenkins in a statement. “Now we have a full solution that helps small businesses manage their inventory purchases all the way from electronic purchase orders to invoices and payments.”

Part of that effort has also been helped by way of a key hire, William Reid, who had previously been director of innovation for PayPal. He now runs the startup’s payments business.

“OrderWithMe has a huge opportunity to truly disrupt B2B payments with its vast network of suppliers and buyers,” he said in a statement. “The unique business model allows us to scale quickly as we support groups of independent retailers to act as one big account to our suppliers. This provides retailers the ability to make all of their inventory purchases through us while lowering their costs and improving their cash flow.”