When much of the shopping shifted online during the global pandemic. These startups developing software and other products to aid the transition began to garner attention from venture capital firms
Algorithmic platform CommerceIQ, which helps consumer brands win in e-commerce. It has raised Series D funding of $115 million (around Rs 874 crore) led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at unicorn valuation.
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 and added support for local websites like Flipkart. The company employs over 150 people out of its Bengaluru office. It is expected to nearly double that by the end of the year.
Priya Saiprasad will also join the CommerceIQ Board of Directors.
“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 at 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 e-commerce”.
The round also saw participation from existing investors including Insight Partners, Trinity Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Madrona Venture Group, the firm said in a statement on Monday.
The Series D round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. That included the participation of all its existing institutional investors – Insight Partners, Trinity Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Madrona Venture Group.
The investment will be used to expand CommerceIQ’s business globally, including India. To accelerate the development of its platform, which connects and automates data and decisions across the entire e-commerce stack.
The investment will also aid hiring for CommerceIQ in India, including expansion across software development, data science & analytics, product operations, and customer support.
About Company
CommerceIQ uses machine learning, analytics, and automation to aggregate data across sales, marketing, and supply chain operations. It helps 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.
Hariharan’s background is in machine learning and e-commerce, and while working at Amazon, he said the goal was to take humans out of the equation in retail. So his team built software, called Amazon Selling Coach, on how to interact with the brands.
As people started to shift their purchases of items, from tools to toothpaste, to Amazon and other marketplaces. Hariharan wanted to start a company that would power where all of that money was going.
Their Words
“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. It is 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.
