E-commerce platform Bigcommerce has raised USD $50 million in Series D funding. This round of funding adds to the $75 million raised to date, taking the total funding raised by this fast-growing Australian start-up to a whopping $125 million.
This latest round of financing was led by SoftBank Capital, a venture firm affiliated with SoftBank Corp., and included Telstra Ventures and American Express, as well as existing investors General Catalyst and Revolution Growth.
Steve Murray, a partner at SoftBank Capital which has previously invested in the likes of Yahoo!, BuzzFeed, Criteo and Huffington Post, will now join the Bigcommerce board.
“We are thrilled to partner with Eddie and this outstanding leadership team as the business achieves scale and accelerates its growth both in the U.S. and internationally,” he said.
Tyler Vaughey, Vice President, U.S. Small Merchants at American Express remarked, “American Express is committed to helping small merchants, and our investment in Bigcommerce is one of the many ways we are working to equip these businesses with resources that can enable them to grow.”
“With the convergence of online and offline, many small merchants are looking for ways to strengthen customer engagement, and Bigcommerce has created a platform that enables merchants to address this key business objective,” he explained.
What does Bigcommerce plan to use this new funding for?
The company intends to use this $50 million to invest in bettering its platform, aggressively growing its sales and marketing, and rapidly expanding to new international markets.
“Partnering with SoftBank Capital gives us access to the growing Asian market and opportunities within SoftBank Group companies, including Alibaba, while American Express and Telstra share our passion for helping businesses in the U.S and Australia respectively,” said Eddie Machaalani (pictured above), co-founder and CEO of Bigcommerce.
“With this new round of funding, we will continue to level the commerce playing field so that every merchant has the opportunity to build a compelling brand and scalable business to effectively compete with the largest players in their industry.”
Perfect timing as ecommerce is poised to hit $2 trillion in 2015
This latest funding comes at a great time for Bigcommerce, which has seen significant year-over-year revenue growth ever since its founding in 2009 and is now well on its way to hitting the $5 billion mark in total online sales across merchants.
E-commerce as a segment of the total retail market is growing at 30 per cent per year and is expected to reach $2 trillion in sales worldwide in 2015.
Furthermore, clients on the Bigcommerce platform have been found to experience 24 per cent higher gross merchandise volume (GMV) than those on other platforms so this latest funding will come in handy in leveraging this competitive advantage.
Bigcommerce has been inking a string of big-name deals
Raising $50 million in funding is undeniably big news for this five year old Australian start-up but it’s worth noting that that’s not all they have been up to lately.
Over the past year, Bigcommerce has signed several new major agreements in its mission to provide its clients with next-generation ecommerce functionality.
Bigcommerce recently announced the industry’s first open mPOS platform with Lightspeed POS and NCR Silver joining as launch partners to provide merchants with best-in-class, omni-channel solutions for businesses selling both online and in-store.
Also this month, Bigcommerce launched as a founding developer partner with Poynt — the world’s first smart payment terminal targeting the 16 million merchants that will be upgrading ahead of the 2015 EMV mandate.
In October, Bigcommerce announced a new partnership with Alibaba.com to streamline product sourcing for merchants. SoftBank Corp. is a one-third owner of Alibaba.
You know Alibaba, right? The company that had the largest IPO ever at $25 billion?
In July, Magento, an eBay Enterprise company, selected Bigcommerce as a SaaS ecommerce migration provider for its ProStores and Magento Go platform discontinuation.
Earlier this year, Bigcommerce partnered with Endurance International Group’s Homestead brand to re-launch 6,700 of their merchants’ online stores.
Bigcommerce has also been adding several new features to the platform, including:
Bigcommerce Analytics, a real-time reporting tool that offers SMEs the same big data insights and powerful analytics once only available to billion dollar industry giants.
The Single Click App Store, which allows merchants to easily integrate their online store with the other software they use in running their businesses.
One-click payments setup, where merchants can set up popular payment options like PayPal and Stripe, as well as a new theme store offering merchants more options of polishing the look of their online stores.
These guys have really been busy eh?