Former Paypal Executive Joins Bigcommerce As CEO

Bigcommerce, the Austin-based platform that helps retail businesses go online, now has a new chief executive officer. The company announced today that Brent Bellm, who is a former CEO of Paypal Europe, will lead Bigcommerce as it eyes an initial public offering.

Immediately prior to joining Bigcommerce, Bellm was president and chief operating officer of Airbnb competitor HomeAway, and helped lead it through its 2011 IPO. His experience will come in handy for Bigcommerce as it preps for its own stock market debut.

Founder and former CEO Eddie Machaalani will become Bigcommerce’s executive chairman. Both he and co-founder Mitchell Harper will stay on Bigcommerce’s board.

In an internal email obtained by TechCrunch, Harper and Machaalani said:

“When we asked ourselves how we could make Bigcommerce synonymous with commerce, we knew what the answer was. Like the Google, LinkedIn and Twitter founders did before us, we need to partner with someone who can take Bigcommerce further, faster.

To help us do that, we’re extremely excited to let you know that we’ve hired Brent Bellm to join the company as our CEO, starting today.

Brent has an incredible background, which he will share with you at tomorrow’s all-hands meeting. But a few highlights include being CEO of Paypal Europe helping triple quarterly revenues and most recently the President and Chief Operating Officer of HomeAway, helping take the company public in 2010 and once again tripling quarterly revenues during his tenure.

Brent knows what it takes to build, scale and grow enduring companies that lead markets and win – and we couldn’t be more proud or humbled that he’s decided to join us on our mission to democratize commerce.”

Bigcommerce, which currently has 95,000 brands on its platform, is focusing on enterprise products for high-volume retailers to differentiate from competitors like Shopify and Magento. It has raised a total of $125 million from backers including SoftBank Capital, Telstra Ventures, American Express, General Catalyst, and Revolution Growth.