With the Covid pandemic highlighting the importance of e-commerce optimization, retailers and grocers have moved at a furious pace to market their products in the ever-changing commerce landscape. In the startup world, e-commerce projects are some of the most well funded and CommerceIQ is the latest to receive venture capital.
On Monday, the Palo Alto-based company announced that it closed a $115 million Series D funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. This fresh funding propelled CommerceIQ to unicorn status with a valuation of over $1 billion. The latest investment comes less than a year after the company secured $60 million in a Series C round.
“As e-commerce penetration continues to surge, competition and technical complexity will make it harder than ever for brands to stand out online,” Priya Saiprasad, a partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said in a statement. “We believe that CommerceIQ can provide companies with a substantial edge by harnessing the power of algorithms and automation to supercharge their online presence. We are delighted to partner with [CEO] Guru [Hariharan] and the team on their mission to help brands win in e-commerce.”
CommerceIQ got its start in 2016 under the name Boomerang Commerce. At the time, the company focused on finding price optimization solutions for businesses. As the years went by, CommerceIQ founder Hariharan began leveraging algorithms to better understand shopping patterns on sites like Amazon and Walmart.
Today, the company’s platform uses algorithms and automation to monitor sales activity and can flag products that will be out of stock in the near future. The platform also keeps track of items after they leave the facility and are in the shipment process or items that have been returned.
For retailers, CommerceIQ’s platform automates everything from revenue statistics to marketing. According to the company, over 2,200 brands use the platform, including global corporations such as Johnson & Johnson and Kellogg’s.
“Our mission is to empower brands to move from analog to algorithms. Winners in this new era of commerce will be determined by how fast they can reinvent their business from siloed and manual to fully connected and automated. And our customers are winning big — with an average revenue growth of 18 percent — driven by real-time optimizations that boost share-of-voice, minimize out-of-stock and prevent revenue leakage,” Hariharan said in a statement.
With the new capital, CommerceIQ is planning to expand its presence globally. The company currently has several U.S.-based, remote positions open on its website, ranging from business analytics and sales to data sciences and engineering.
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