CommerceIQ Joins Unicorn Club, Raises $115 Million Series D The funding round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and includes participation from all existing institutional investors
By S Shanthi •
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CommerceIQ, a retail e-commerce management platform, has announced the closing of a $115 million Series D financing round, bringing the company's total valuation to more than $1 billion. The new funding follows CommerceIQ's $60 million Series C round in June 2021, bringing total funding in the last 12 months to $175 million.
The funding round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and includes participation from all existing institutional investors including Insight Partners, Trinity Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Madrona Venture Group. This investment will be used to expand CommerceIQ's business globally, including India, and to accelerate the development of its unified Retail Ecommerce Management Platform, which connects and automates data and decisions across the entire e-commerce stack to power intelligent, profitable growth for leading global brands. The investment will also fuel accelerated hiring for CommerceIQ in India, including expansion across software development, data science & analytics, product operations, and customer support.
As part of a recently announced go-to-market expansion to service brands in the Indian market, CommerceIQ has tweaked its algorithmic components to optimally respond to shoppers' behavior on local retailers like Amazon.in and added support for local websites like Flipkart. The company employs over 150 people out of its Bengaluru office, and is expected to nearly double that by the end of the year.
"As e-commerce penetration continues to surge, competition and technical complexity will make it harder than ever for brands to stand out online," said Priya Saiprasad, partner, SoftBank Investment Advisers. "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 Guru and the team on their mission to help brands win in eCommerce," she added.
CommerceIQ uses machine learning, analytics, and automation to aggregate data across sales, marketing, and supply chain operations, helping trusted brands gain shoppers at the moment of purchase and maintain customer loyalty. The technology behind CommerceIQ's platform has been developed out of CommerceIQ's Bengaluru facilities.
"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 average revenue growth of 18 per cent, driven by real-time optimizations that boost share-of-voice (SOV), minimize out-of-stock (OOS), and prevent revenue leakage," said Guru Hariharan, CEO of CommerceIQ. "We are beyond grateful to our investment partners for their support that will enable us to quickly scale and address the urgent needs of large consumer brands to unlock their full potential. By providing intelligent automation across the entire ecommerce stack, CommerceIQ will become even more critical for brands to grow their market share and profitability."
On the heels of a Series C funding in the first half of 2021, California-based CommerceIQ closed out the year doubling year-over-year revenue, doubling customers served, and doubling headcount across every department in the U.S. and India.
Elaborating further on its exponential growth, Prasun Kumar, VP Engineering and Head of India Operations, CommerceIQ said, "We are extremely proud of our record-breaking performance in 2021 and we expect strong growth to continue as retail e-commerce adoption rapidly grows globally. Our footprint in India will be aggressively expanded to capitalize on our global growth and momentum. We are expecting 2022 to be a watershed year for us."
