CommerceIQ will use this investment to grow its business in India and around the globe, add more platforms, and create more tools and products.
When most of the world’s shopping went online during the pandemic, entrepreneurs providing software and other items to aid the transition began to attract venture capitalists’ attention.
We’ve seen firms throughout the e-commerce infrastructure and enabling ecosystem raise greater and larger rounds of funding, and CommerceIQ is the latest to do so. Guru Hariharan is the CEO, and you may recall him from retail analytics firm Boomerang Commerce, which was a Startup Battlefield finalist in 2014. In 2019, he sold the firm to Lowe’s.
Hariharan has a background in machine learning and e-commerce, and when working at Amazon, he stated that the objective was to remove people from the equation in retail, thus his team created software called Amazon Selling Coach to teach customers how to connect with companies.
Hariharan wanted to build a firm that would power where all of that money was going as individuals began to migrate their purchases of products, from tools to toothpaste, to Amazon and other marketplaces.
“If you look at the entire retail situation — buying products from a brand, the buy and sell sides need to be balanced,” Hariharan said. “I left to start the company to focus on building the sell side of the equation for brands to sell and interface with retailers on the buy side.”
CommerceIQ’s retail e-commerce management products automate and consolidate components such as category analytics and retail advertising, sales, and operations management for companies under one roof. Customers should expect an 18% increase in sales on average, he noted.
The San Francisco-based firm today works with over 2,200 companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg’s, Kimberly-Clark, and Bayer, to manage incremental sales, category market share, and unit profitability via online retailers such as Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Instacart.
CommerceIQ raised $115 million in Series D fundraising, bringing the company’s worth to more than $1 billion. The most recent financial injection comes less than a year after a $60 million Series C deal in June 2021. It also brings CommerceIQ’s total capital secured in the last 12 months to $175 million, with a total of $196 million secured to date.
SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the investment round, which included included participation from previous investors such as Insight Partners, Trinity Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Madrona Venture Group.
“E-commerce penetration has risen at an unprecedented rate, and online channels are a strategic priority for large brands,” she said. “Traditional brick-and-mortar strategy doesn’t transfer over to e-commerce, but the old way with spreadsheets and human-driven operations don’t scale. CommerceIQ is the leading channel optimization platform enabling the largest brands to win in retail.”
In addition to the possibility to collaborate with Saiprasad, Hariharan stated that seeing the $4.5 trillion retail business at a significant inflection moment was the driving force behind going seeking fresh money — especially since its seed fund is still firmly in the bank. During the worldwide pandemic, the sector as a whole advanced five years in a short of 12 months, with $1 trillion moving through e-commerce.
In terms of the $1 trillion breakdown in e-commerce, Hariharan thinks that $150 billion is direct-to-consumer, while the remaining $850 billion is indirect-to-consumer, such as Walmart, Target, and Gopuff sites.
As a result, he feels the moment has come to accelerate CommerceIQ. The corporation ended 2021 with 106 percent year-over-year revenue growth, 113 percent rise in clients serviced, and a 100 percent increase in worldwide personnel.
The corporation also increased its automations, delivering 215 million last year, an increase of 70 million in a year. Hariharan hopes to provide 500 million automations this year. Meanwhile, the software is handling $1.1 billion in transactions, up from $250 million last year.
