Bigcommerce Raises $50 Million in Growth Equity

Mark Freidin

22nd Nov 2014

Bigcommerce, the ecommerce platform of choice for fast-growing brands, today announced it has raised $50 million in Series D funding. The company will use the funds to invest in product development, aggressively grow sales and marketing, and expand its business to new markets. The 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, will join the Bigcommerce board.

“Bigcommerce’s easy to use, cloud-based platform allows businesses of all sizes to rapidly build and deploy full-service ecommerce and m-commerce tools to grow revenues,” said Murray. “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.”

Ecommerce Market to hit $2 Trillion in 2015
Ecommerce 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, according to Bigcommerce research. The company has seen significant year-over-year revenue growth and is approaching $5 billion in total online sales across merchants. Clients on the Bigcommerce platform experience 24 per cent higher gross merchandise volume (GMV) over competitive platforms.

Bigcommerce Inks Big-Name Deals
Over the past year, Bigcommerce signed several new agreements to provide 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 16M 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.
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 recently added several new features to the platform, including Bigcommerce Analytics, an enterprise-grade real-time reporting tool; the Single Click App Store, an easy way for merchants to integrate their store with the other software they use to run their business; one-click payments setup, where merchants can set up popular payment options like PayPal and Stripe; and a new theme store packed with dozens of new free and premium themes.

“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,” said Tyler Vaughey, Vice President, U.S. Small Merchants at American Express. “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.”

“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, 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.”