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Air quality monitoring service Airly raises $2 million as fires, pollution force consumers to take note
As smoke from fires chokes the skies in the western U.S. and pollution chokes much of the world, air quality has become yet another issue for civilization to address.
Industrialization and natural disasters wrought by climate change are spewing more toxic matter into the air, and governments around the world are racing to monitor what the combination of catastrophes and economic growth could mean for their citizens.
The ability to get an accurate measurement of the air quality in their home city of Krakow, Poland is what drove the team of engineers that launched Airly to start their business.
Founded by three engineering students, Michal Misiek, Wiktor Warchalowski and Aleksander Konior, the company combines sensing technologies and software to measure particulate matter and emissions like NOx, SOx, methane and carbon monoxide in the air.
“We are using software and calibration algorithms to provide the best data,” said Warchalowski, who serves as the company’s chief executive officer. The company is more than just collecting air quality. The three engineers have also developed an algorithm that they say can accurately predict air quality for up to 24 hours based on the data they gather.
The current market for air quality assessment tools stands at roughly $4 billion today and will reach $6.5 billion by 2025. Already, Airly’s technology is being used by around 400 cities across Europe and Asia by several universities and corporations, including Philips, PwC, Motorola, Aviva, Veolia and Skanska. The company has also released an API so media, technology and finance companies can access live air quality data. There’s also an app for consumers who want to get a sense of the air out there.
Airparif, the French-based air quality assessment organization, awarded the company an honor for being the most accurate air quality device it had seen.
The company initially started because Warchalowski and his friends were training for a marathon and wanted to see when would be the best time to run so they wouldn’t be exposed to pollution. “When I wanted to run at 5PM and the data was from 2PM it was not up to date,” he said.
More than 2 million people are now using the company’s app. “There are more people like me that need that data,” Warchalowski said.
Airly makes money by selling its device, which is roughly the size of an iPhone, to consumers and communities, and by charging for access to its API. The device costs $300 and API access starts at $1,000, according to Warchalowski.
With revenue in hand and the imprimatur of leading air quality monitoring organizations, its little wonder that Airly was able to attract venture backing from Sir Richard Branson’s and Sir Ronald Cohen’s families; Pipedrive co-founder Martin Tajur; Cherry Ventures partner and former Spotify CMO Sophia Bendz; former Gojek CMO Piotr Jakubowski; and Henkel board member Konstantin von Unger, in a $2 million round led by the newly formed investment firm Giant Ventures .
“By building the leading source of air quality data globally, Airly is creating enormous social and economic value,” said Cameron McLain, a managing partner and co-founder of Giant Ventures.
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Indianapolis-based Malomo raises $2.8 million to turn order tracking into a branded customer experience
Yaw Aning named Malomo, the service he launched for small businesses to turn their order-tracking services into branded customer experiences, as a tribute to his mother, who was a small business owner herself.
“Malomo” means flowers in Swahili and it was the name of Aning’s mother’s small soap-making business which she built over the years — even as she was battling the cancer to which she would eventually succumb.
The small Indianapolis startup has just raised $2.8 million to expand its services providing a new marketing channel for the Shopify retailers of the world who can always use more ways to reach new customers, Aning said.
The financing came from the San Francisco-based firm, Base 10, and New York’s Harlem Capital, along with commitments from previous investors Hyde Park and High Alpha.
Aning came to entrepreneurship as an Orr Fellow, an Indiana program that takes 10 graduates and places them in high-growth companies. While Aning worked in corporate finance, he was always interested in the startup world, and started is first company, Pocket Tales, an online reading game for children.
That business was followed by Sticks and Leaves, a web design agency that gave Aning his first view into the opportunity that order tracking presented as a space for a better customer experience.
Along with co-founder Anthony Smith, Aning built a service that connects with a single click to the Shopify platform and creates custom, branded tracking pages for each brand. “It’s a landing page for a brand. They use it like they would use any marketing asset,” Aning said. “The strategy is to build up integrations to the other tools merchants use to create rich experiences leveraging those tools.”
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Paired picks up $1M funding and launches its relationship app for couples
Paired, a new app for couples, is launching today and disclosing $1 million in funding. Backing the startup, which wants to support “happier and healthier” relationships, is Taavet Hinrikus of TransferWise, the co-founders of Runtastic (which was sold to Adidas), Ed Cooke of Memrise and Bernhard Niesner of Busuu.
Founded in September 2019 by Kevin Shanahan and Diego López, who previously worked together at language learning app Memrise, and joined shortly afterwards by Chief Relationships Officer Dr Jacqui Gabb, who is Professor of Sociology and Intimacy at The Open University, Paired combines audio tips from experts with “fun daily questions and quizzes” that partners answer together.
The app has been piloted (and iterated) in Australia for the last six months and is pitched as different to traditional couples therapy, which is often prescribed to couples in distress, in that it is targeting the “full spectrum” of couples who want help building intimacy and improving communication. The idea is that Paired can provide the steps needed by couples to improve their relationship each day.
Available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, Paired is free to download but requires a subscription to unlock the full library of content.
“Our relationship with our partner is one of the most important parts of our lives: it affects our physical health, our mental health, and the lives of our children,” says Kevin Shanahan, co-founder and CEO. “However, there aren’t many solutions to help couples keep their relationship healthy. Most are designed for couples in distress”.
Image Credits: Paired
Shanahan says that Paired prompts you and your partner to take “small, positive steps” to improve your relationship. To do this, the startup works with relationship academics and therapists to create quizzes, audio courses, and tips that “help you to learn more about each other, resolve conflict, and build intimacy”.
Experts collaborating with Paired include University of Washington Professor and Married at First Sight USA’s Dr. Pepper Schwartz, University of Exeter academics Mark Rivett and Hannah Sherbersky, and Oakland University Professor and Marriage and Family Therapist Dr. Terri Orbuch.
After downloading Paired, you’re asked if you’d like to pair with your partner to swap answers. To enable this, you’re given a unique code to share. Alternatively, you can choose to pair later or just use the app by yourself.
“Each day we then prompt you to answer either a question or quiz,” explains Shanahan. “These rotate between different areas of your relationship so you can learn which areas are strong and which have room for growth. If you’re paired with your partner, then when they answer the quiz or question you can unlock each other’s answer and discuss them together.
“In parallel, you begin listening to (and will soon be able to read) audio courses and tips that are presented by top relationship academics and therapists. These are on a range of topics — including sex and intimacy, managing conflict, and parenting — and include couple case studies to learn from and exercises to do outside of the app”.
Shanahan describes Paired’s user base as quite broad, made up of new couples, some who have been together for a long time, long-distance couples and people using the app individually. The majority are aged 30-50 and use the app with their partner.
“Each day they typically use the app for about 5 minutes and (based on anecdotal feedback) discuss their answers outside of the app for another 5 minutes or so,” says the Paired CEO.
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Pixie Labs raises $9.15M Series A round for its Kubernetes observability platform
Pixie, a startup that provides developers with tools to get observability into their Kubernetes-native applications, today announced that it has raised a $9.15 million Series A round led by Benchmark, with participation from GV. In addition, the company also today said that its service is now available as a public beta.
The company was co-founded by Zain Asgar (CEO), a former Google engineer working on Google AI and adjunct professor at Stanford, and Ishan Mukherjee (CPO), who led Apple’s Siri Knowledge Graph product team and also previously worked on Amazon’s Robotics efforts. Asgar had originally joined Benchmark to work on developer tools for machine learning. Over time, the idea changed to using machine learning to power tools to help developers manage large-scale deployments instead.
“We saw data systems, this move to the edge, and we felt like this old cloud 1.0 model of manually collecting data and shipping it to databases in the cloud seems pretty inefficient,” Mukherjee explained. “And the other part was: I was on call. I got gray hair and all that stuff. We felt like we could build this new generation of developer tools and get to Michael Jordan’s vision of intelligent augmentation, which is giving creatives tools where they can be a lot more productive.”
Image Credits: Pixie
The team argues that most competing monitoring and observability systems focus on operators and IT teams — and often involve a long manual setup process. But Pixie wants to automate most of this manual process and build a tool that developers want to use.
Pixie runs inside a developer’s Kubernetes platform and developers get instant and automatic visibility into their production environments. With Pixie, which the team is making available as a freemium SaaS product, there is no instrumentation to install. Instead, the team uses relatively new Linux kernel techniques like eBPF to collect data right at the source.
“One of the really cool things about this is that we can deploy Pixie in about a minute and you’ll instantly get data,” said Asgar. “Our goal here is that this really helps you when there are cases where you don’t want your business logic to be full of monitoring code, especially if you forget something — when you have an outage.”
Image Credits: Pixie
At the core of the developer experience is what the company calls “Pixie scripts.” Using a Python-like language (PxL), developers can codify their debugging workflows. The company’s system already features a number of scripts written by the team itself and the community at large. But as Asgar noted, not every user will write scripts. “The way scripts work, it’s supposed to capture human knowledge in that problem. We don’t expect the average user — or even the way-above-average developer — ever to touch a script or write one. They’re just going to use it in a specific scenario,” he explained.
Looking ahead, the team plans to make these scripts and the scripting language more robust and usable to allow developers to go from passively monitoring their systems to building scripts that can actively take actions on their clusters based on the monitoring data the system collects.
“Zain and Ishan’s provocative idea was to move software monitoring to the source,” said Eric Vishria, general partner at Benchmark. “Pixie enables engineering teams to fundamentally rethink their monitoring strategy as it presents a vision of the future where we detect anomalous behavior and make operational decisions inside the infrastructure layer itself. This allows companies of all sizes to monitor their digital experiences in a more responsive, cost-effective and scalable manner.”
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With $18M in new funding, Braintrust says it’s creating a fairer model for freelancers
Braintrust, a network for freelance technical and design talent that launched over the summer, is announcing that it has raised $18 million in new funding.
Co-founder and CEO Adam Jackson has written for TechCrunch about how tech companies need to treat independent contractors with more empathy. He told me via email that the San Francisco-based startup is making that idea a reality by offering a very different approach than existing marketplaces for freelance work.
For one thing, Braintrust only charges the companies doing the hiring — freelancers won’t have to pay to join or to bid on a project, and Braintrust won’t charge a fee on their project payments. In addition, the startup is using a cryptocurrency token that it calls Btrust to reward users who build the network, for example by inviting new customers or vetting freelancers. Apparently, the token will give users a stake in how the network evolves in the future.
“Just imagine if Uber had given all of its drivers some ownership in the company what a different company it would be today,” Jackson said. “Braintrust will be 100% user-owned. Everyone who participates on the platform has skin in the game.”
And for companies, Braintrust is supposed to allow them to tap freelancers for work that they’d normally do in-house. The startup’s clients already include Nestlé, Pacific Life, Deloitte, Porsche, Blue Cross Blue Shield and TaskRabbit.
According to Jackson, most of the talent on the platform consists of career freelancers, but with many people losing their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, “we’ve seen an influx of talent coming looking to join the ranks of the freelancers.”
He added that the startup already became profitable after raising its $6 million seed round, so the new funding will allow it to build the core team and also bring in more work.
“We exist to help companies accelerate their product roadmaps and innovation, and this injection of funding will help us do just that,” Jackson said.
The new funding was led by ACME and Blockchange, with participation from new investors Pantera, Multicoin and Variant.
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Altinity grabs $4M seed to build cloud version of ClickHouse open-source data warehouse
Earlier this month, cloud data warehouse Snowflake turned heads when it debuted on the stock market. Today, Altinity, the commercial company behind the open-source ClickHouse data warehouse, announced a $4 million seed round from Accel along with a new cloud service, Altinity.Cloud.
“Fundamentally, the company started out as an open-source services bureau offering support, training and [custom] engineering features into ClickHouse. And what we’re doing now with this investment from Accel is we’re extending it to offer a cloud platform in addition to the other things that we already have,” CEO Robert Hodges told TechCrunch.
As the company describes it, “Altinity.Cloud offers immediate access to production-ready ClickHouse clusters with expert enterprise support during every aspect of the application life cycle.” It also helps with application design and implementation and production assistance, in essence combining the consulting side of the house with the cloud service.
The company was launched in 2017 by CTO Alexander Zaitsev, who was one of the early adopters of ClickHouse. Up until now the startup has been bootstrapped with revenue from the services business.
Hodges came on board last year after a stint at VMware because he saw a company with tremendous potential, and his background in cloud services made him a good person to lead the company as it built the cloud product and moved into its next phase.
ClickHouse at its core is a relational database that can run in the cloud or on-prem with big improvements in performance, Hodges says. And he says that developers are enamored with it because you can start a project on a laptop and scale it up from there.
“We’re very simple to operate, just a single binary. You can start from a Docker image. You can run it anywhere, literally anywhere that Linux runs, from an Intel Nuc all the way up to clusters with hundreds of nodes,” Hodges explained.
The investment from Accel should help them finish building the cloud product, which has been in private beta since July, while helping them build a sales and marketing operation to help sell it to the target enterprise market. The startup currently has 27 people, with plans to hire 15 more.
Hodges says that he wants to build a diverse and inclusive company, something he says the tech industry in general has failed at achieving. He believes that one of the reasons for that is the requirement of a computer science degree, which he says has created “a gate for women and people of color,” and he thinks by hiring people with more diverse backgrounds, you can build a more diverse company.
“So one of the things that’s high up on my list is to get back to a more equitable and diverse population of people working on this thing,” he said.
Over time, the company sees the cloud business overtaking the consulting arm in terms of revenue, but that aspect of the business will always have a role in the revenue mix because this is complex by its nature, even with a cloud service.
“Customers can’t just do it entirely by having a push-button interface. They will actually need humans that work with them, and help them understand how to frame problems, help them understand how to build applications that take care of that […] And then finally, help them deal with problems that naturally arise when you’re when you’re in production,” he said.
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Investors give Baltimore’s Facet Wealth $25 million to sell businesses on financial planning as a benefit
Yesterday, Baltimore-based fintech company Facet Wealth said it raised $25 million in financing as it readies a new business line pitching financial planning as an employment benefit to businesses looking to recruit top talent.
Employment benefit packages are expanding beyond the basic gym membership and healthcare to include subscriptions to Netflix, discounts on delivery and rideshare services, and other perks. So why not financial wellness?
The thesis certainly managed to attract a big-money backer, with Warburg Pincus, the multi-billion-dollar private equity investment firm, which doubled down on its commitment with the new financing into the company.
The company said the latest round would be used to finance the expansion of Facet Wealth’s direct-to-consumer business even as it readies its employee benefit service for launch.
Already customers are signing up for pre-launch partnerships to get their employees on the program. Early wannabe users include ClassPass, MyVest and Chili Piper, the company said.
“Since our first investment two years ago, the Facet Wealth team has proven their ability to meet a unique consumer need, evolving and expanding their offering to build a truly innovative client experience and business model,” said Jeff Stein, managing director at Warburg Pincus. “Their expansion into the employer market further solidifies them as a category-defining company that is well-positioned to disrupt the wealth management industry for years to come.”
To date, Facet Wealth has raised $62 million in funding from Warburg Pincus, Slow Ventures and other, undisclosed investors.
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Homer nabs $50M from Lego, Sesame Workshop and Gymboree for its early learning apps
For better or worse, tablets and smartphones have become a cornerstone of how many younger children pass the time. Today, a company that builds literacy and other educational apps to help make that time more worthwhile is announcing a large round of funding from a number of strategic backers to move into the next phase of its growth, building not just apps but a comprehensive learning platform.
BEGiN, the startup behind the Homer early learning program aimed primarily at kids between the ages of two and eight, has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding, money that it plans to use to, in the words of CEO Neal Shenoy (who co-founded the company with Stephanie Dua), create a “systematic experience” in learning.
The startup has been around since 2013 and got its start with literacy — it says that its reading apps are currently the most popular for children under age five in the U.S. App Store — which remains its core subject area, but it has also expanded into other subject areas and plans to take that further.
“We are launching the industry’s first comprehensive early learning program,” he said in an interview. “And so from a curriculum perspective, this will extend beyond reading to include math, critical thinking, creativity, and socio-emotional learning, we will deliver this learning, these experiences, across digital, physical, tangible product, and in class mediums, we will focus on both serving the child and the parent and the relationship between them says the parent is the child’s first teacher.”
The round includes a number of strategic investors that will help bring this together. The backers include LEGO Ventures, Sesame Workshop, the principal investor in Gymboree Play & Music, 3One4 Capital, Trustbridge Partners and Interlock Partners. In addition to the $50 million, Liquidity Capital is also contributing $25 million in trajectory-based funding for further growth. The strategic backers plan to help build the curriculum, the products and the distribution for the new program, he said.
The valuation of Homer, and BEGiN itself, is not being disclosed, but the company said that it already has hundreds of thousands of subscribers and generates tens of millions of dollars in revenues.
The funding news and strategic expansion comes at a critical time in the educational industry, and e-learning in particular.
Children’s educational apps — and taking even just those focused on early learning (Age of Learning is another leader in this segment of the market) — have been around for as long as the internet itself. But they have always existed in conjunction with a host of more conventional resources, such as nurseries and schools, playgroups and other activities, and general socialization. The global health pandemic, however, has changed all that for many people: many families, kids included, are spending more time at home and away from teachers and the (real life) social networks that play a part in how they develop.
That’s put a huge emphasis on rethinking how tech-based tools, starting with gadgets like tablets and software like apps, can make up the difference, for now or maybe even for longer, to make sure that kids continue to learn, but also feel engaged and stimulated at a time when a lot of options for doing that have been reduced.
Joining up app makers with those who make educational physical objects is a not a new thing per se: “educational toys,” as any parent knows, are a dime a dozen in terms of supply (if not cost… they can be expensive). But it’s interesting to see toy makers joining up with those who build entertainment content and other products for children for an even bigger-picture approach to identifying and building to address the challenge of how best to deliver some aspects of early-years education.
Indeed, LEGO Ventures is a newish effort from the Danish modular toy maker, founded to help the company, now more than 70 years old, step into the next phase of how children learn and keep themselves entertained.
“HOMER’s vision and approach to playful learning fosters curiosity and collaboration in children that aligns closely with LEGO Ventures’ investment ethos supporting founders and companies in bringing the LEGO idea of learning-through-play to life,” said Jamie Beaumont, managing partner, LEGO Ventures, in a statement. “We look forward to working with Neal and the excellent team he has built, and supporting HOMER as they grow and scale their purposeful play offerings across hands-on, in-person and digital experiences.”
As with e-learning companies targeting other age groups, the startup has seen a huge boost in business in the last several months, with a 280% increase in annual subscriptions, 230% increase in website subscriptions, and children accessing 30% more lessons than this time last year. (Overall, the company has had 80%+ year-over-year growth since launch.)
“With its focus on research and kid-centric design, and expansion to embrace the whole child curriculum, HOMER’s approach reflects the mission of Sesame Workshop to help kids grow smarter, strong and kinder,” said Steve Youngwood, president of Media and Education, and chief operating officer of Sesame Workshop, in a statement. “We’re excited to support HOMER’s growth and to look for further ways to partner with them to give young children the best possible start at a critical time of their learning and development.”
Additional reporting Natasha Mascarenhas
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Coralogix lands $25M Series B to rethink log analysis and monitoring
Logging and monitoring tends to be an expensive endeavor because of the sheer amount of data involved. Companies are therefore forced to pick and choose what they monitor, limiting what they can see. Coralogix wants to change that by offering a more flexible pricing model, and today the company announced a $25 million Series B and a new real-time analytics solution called Streama.
First the funding. The round was led by Red Dot Capital Partners and O.G. Tech Ventures, with help from existing investors Aleph VC, StageOne Ventures, Janvest Capital Partners and 2B Angels. Today’s round, which comes after the startup’s $10 million Series A last November, brings the total to $41.2 million raised, according to the company.
When we spoke to Coralogix CEO and co-founder Ariel Assaraf last year regarding the A round, he described his company as more of an intelligent applications performance monitoring with some security logging analytics.
Today, the company announced Streama, which has been in Alpha since July. Assaraf says companies can pick and choose how they monitor and pay only for the features they use. That means if a particular log is only tangentially important, a customer can set it to low priority and save money, and direct the budget toward more important targets.
As the pandemic has taken hold, he says that companies are appreciating the ability to save money on their monitoring costs, and directing those resources elsewhere in the company. “We’re basically building out this full platform that is going to be inside-centric and value-centric instead of volume or machine count-centric in its pricing model,” Assaraf said.
Assaraf differentiates his company from others out there like Splunk, Datadog and Sumo Logic, saying his is a more modern approach to the problem that simplifies the operations. “All these complicated engineering things are being abstracted away in a simple way, so that any user can very quickly create savings and demonstrate that it’s [no longer] an engineering problem, it’s more of a business value question,” he explained.
Since the A round, the company has grown from 25 to 60 people spread out between Israel and the U.S. It plans to grow to 120 people in the next year with the new funding. When it comes to diversity in hiring, he says Israel is fairly homogeneous, so it involves gender parity there, something that he says he is working to achieve. The U.S. operation is still relatively small, with just 12 employees now, but it will be expanding in the next year and it’s something he says that he will need to be thinking about as he hires.
As part of that hiring spree, he wants to kick his sales and marketing operations into higher gear and start spending more on those areas as the company grows.
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VTEX raises $225M at a $1.7B valuation for e-commerce solutions aimed at retailers and brands
Retailers and consumer brands are focused more than ever in their histories on using e-commerce channels to connect with customers: the global health pandemic has disrupted much of their traditional business in places like physical stores, event venues and restaurants, and vending machines, and accelerated the hunt for newer ways to sell goods and services. Today, a startup that’s been helping them build those bridges, specifically to expand into newer markets, is announcing a huge round of funding, underscoring the demand.
VTEX, which builds e-commerce solutions and strategies for retailers like Walmart and huge consumer names like AB InBev, Motorola, Stanley Black & Decker, Sony, Walmart, Whirlpool, Coca-Cola and Nestlé, has raised $225 million in new funding, valuing the company at $1.7 billion post-money.
The funding is being co-led by two investors, Tiger Global and Lone Pine Capital, with Constellation, Endeavour Catalyst and SoftBank also participating. It’s a mix of investors, with two leads, that offers a “signal” of what might come next for the startup, said Amit Shah, the company’s chief strategy officer and general manager for North America.
“We’ve seen them invest in big rounds right before companies go public,” he said. “Now, that’s not necessarily happening here right now, but it’s a signal.” The company has been profitable and plans to continue to be, Shah said (making it one example of a SoftBank investment that hasn’t gone sour). Revenues this year are up 114% with $8 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) processed over platforms it’s built.
Given that VTEX last raised money less than a year ago — a $140 million round led by SoftBank’s Latin American Innovation Fund — the valuation jump for the startup is huge. Shah confirmed to us that it represents a 4x increase on its previous valuation (which would have been $425 million).
The interest back in November from SoftBank’s Latin American fund stemmed from VTEX’s beginnings.
The company got its start building e-commerce storefronts and strategies for businesses that were hoping to break into Brazil — the B of the world’s biggest emerging “BRIC” markets — and the rest of Latin America. It made its name building Walmart in the region, and has continued to help run and develop that operation even after Walmart divested the asset, and it’s working with Walmart now in other regions outside the US, too, he added.
But since then, while the Latin American arm of the business has continued to thrive, the company has capitalized both on the funding it had picked up, and the current global climate for e-commerce solutions, to expand its business into more markets, specifically North America, EMEA and most recently Asia.
“We are today even more impressed by the quality and energy of the VTEX team than we were when we invested in the previous round,” said Marcello Silva at Constellation. “The best is yet to come. VTEX’s team is stronger than ever, VTEX’s product is stronger than ever, and we are still in the early stages of ecommerce penetration. We could not miss the opportunity to increase our exposure.”
Revenues were growing at a rate of 50% a year before the pandemic ahead of it’s more recent growth this year of 114%, Shah said. “Of course, we would prefer Covid-19 not to be here, but it has had a good effect on our business. The arc of e-commerce has grown has impacted revenues and created that additional level of investor interest.”
VTEX’s success has hinged not just on catering to companies that have up to now not prioritized their online channels, but in doing so in a way that is more unified.
Consumer packaged goods have been in a multi-faceted bind because of the fragmented way in which they have grown. A drinks brand will not only manufacture on a local level (and sometimes, as in the case of, say, Coca-Cola, use different ingredient formulations), but they will often have products that are only sold in select markets, and because the audiences are different, they’ve devise marketing and distribution strategies on a local level, too.
On top of all that, products like these have long relied on channels like retailers, restaurants, vending machines and more to get their products into the hands of consumers.
These days, of course, all of that has been disrupted: all the traditional channels they would have used to sell things are now either closed or seeing greatly reduced custom. And as for marketing: the rise of social networks has led to a globalization in messaging, where something can go viral all over the world and marketing therefore knows no regional boundaries.
So, all of this means that brands have to rethink everything around how they sell their products, and that’s where a company like VTEX steps in, building strategies and solutions that can be used in multiple regions. Among typical deals, it’s been working with AB InBev to develop a global commerce platform covering 50 countries (replacing multiple products from other vendors, typically competitors to VTEX include SAP, Shopify and Magento, and giving brands and others a viable route to market that doesn’t cut in the likes of Amazon).
“CPG companies are seeking to standardize and make their businesses and lives a little easier,” Shah said. Typical work that it does includes building marketplaces for retailers, or new e-commerce interfaces so that brands can better supply online and offline retailers, or sell directly to customers — for example, with new ways of ordering products to get delivered by others. Shah said that some 200 marketplaces have now been built by VTEX for its customers.
(Shah himself, it’s worth pointing out, has a pedigree in startups and in e-commerce. He founded an e-commerce analytics company called Jirafe, which was acquired by SAP, where he then became the chief revenue officer of SAP Hybris.)
“We are excited to grow quickly in new and existing markets, and offer even more brands a platform that embraces the future of commerce, which is about being collaborative, leveraging marketplaces, and delivering customer experiences that are second-to-none,” said Mariano Gomide de Faria, VTEX co-founder and co-CEO, in a statement. “This injection of funding will undoubtedly support us in achieving our mission to accelerate digital commerce transformation around the world.”
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