Commerce Layer raises $16M Series B led by Coatue.
May 25, 2021 — Today, we are proud to announce that Commerce Layer closed on a $16 million Series B funding round led by Coatue Management, with participation from our existing investors Benchmark and Mango Capital. In addition to the investment, we’re also welcoming Coatue General Partner Caryn Marooney to our Board of Directors.
Caryn is a veteran of the technology industry who has led the communications strategies of some of the world’s most powerful brands, including Facebook, where she served as VP of Global Communications, as well as Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce.com, VMware, and many more as co-founder of The Outcast Agency. But the reason we’re excited to work with Caryn is that she didn’t start with these companies when they were already at the top – she was a critical member of the team helping build the brands when they were still startups like us, helping them through periods of hypergrowth and beyond. We know that Caryn will bring invaluable insights to our team as we continue on our mission to become the commerce API for global brands.
A year of challenges and growth
At this time last year, we were watching the world shut down due to COVID-19. As brick-and-mortar retail was coming to a halt, it was more critical than ever for us to be focused on growing and serving our customers, who were turning to ecommerce as a lifeline.
While it was an unexpected time for Commerce Layer to be entering a new phase of our business and closing our Series A funding, in hindsight it was a critically important time to bring on the support of Benchmark and Eric Vishria, whose partnership has felt more like a co-founder than just a board member.
Over the past year we’ve been investing in our growth and scaling up our infrastructure to support higher volumes of orders and serve the needs of global brands who reach consumers all around the world. Today, Commerce Layer is serving dozens of customers including Chilly's, Brioni, SumUp, Paradox Interactive and Coca Cola Embonor, and as a result we’ve experienced a 6X growth in revenue.
Reemerging stronger
Today marks a new chapter for our company. We’re thrilled to bring Caryn on to our board and work closely with her as we continue to grow and serve the needs of global retailers. She’s passionate about getting involved in the early days of a company to help them achieve their vision. With Coatue and Benchmark by our side, we are well-positioned for growth and couldn't be more lucky to have these partners backing us.
Ecommerce has become core to our everyday lives. As a result, big brands and enterprises need better ways to shift from retail and build exceptional online storefronts. We believe that Commerce Layer is building the API platform for this new category, and we’re incredibly proud to join them in pursuing their ambitious and exciting vision.
As parts of the world are starting to reopen, we find ourselves in another period of change and growth. With our new funding, Commerce Layer will expand our team in both Europe and the United States. We will also be heavily investing in our platform by introducing brand new features that are in our pipeline — some of the products on our roadmap include a new developer dashboard, CLI and order management system, as well as a hosted checkout application, metrics API, a reporting application, and better support for subscription and marketplace models. In addition, we hope to grow our community of developers, which today is thousands-strong.
Tomorrow, we’re excited to get back in the game and virtually attend the Headless Commerce Summit to share more about what we’ve been building and hopefully connect with some of you directly. Stay tuned for more updates from our team by following us on Twitter and join our Slack channel.
Sincerely,
— Filippo Conforti