The e-commerce industry is growing at an estimated rate of 23% each year. Impressive as that is, more than a third of small businesses in the world’s largest economy, the US, do not have any online presence. With the industry value expected to hit $7 trillion by 2025, such businesses run the risk of falling fowl to online competition and losing vital sales to online rivals.
There is a variety of reasons why some businesses neglect an online presence, but a major one is how daunting it can be to make the move to e-commerce, especially if the business is multimarket, with multiple lines, services, and logistics to consider. Standing out as a individual brand and being able to customise your site is also challenging, but essential for both SEO and a positive customer experience.
Saleor, working on the composable commerce sector, which provides a platform to help businesses and developers meet their e-commerce goals, has closed an $8 million seed extension round. The round was led by Target Global, renowned investors behind Revolut and Auto1, and e-commerce giant Zalando. The funding round also saw participation from notable investors, including Kevin Mahaffey (SNR), Cherry Ventures (Moss and Spryker), and TQ Ventures (Groove and Current).
Shaping the future of multimarket commerce
Founded in Poland in 2020 by Mirek Mencel and Patryk Zawadzki, Saleor is an open-source, headless, composable e-commerce platform designed to tame the complexity of multimarket commerce. In 2021, the company secured a $2.5 million seed round, dedicated to building its SaaS cloud offering, resulting in adoption by renowned brands such as Lush and Breitling.
With Saleor’s platform, the front-end [presentation layer] is decoupled from the back-end [business logic layer], allowing developers to build custom front-end experiences while leveraging Saleor’s powerful back-end features. Saleor’s centrepiece is its GraphQL API, which processes complex online store logic. This API enables developers to create rich e-commerce experiences and build scalable solutions.
Strategic allocation of newly secured funds
The newly secured funds will be instrumental in driving growth, expanding the agency program, and enhancing Saleor’s core product. Zalando, a leading European e-commerce destination for fashion and lifestyle, invested based on Saleor’s significant traction with global brands. The collaboration aims to explore joint initiatives aligned with their vision for scalable multimarket commerce—a core set of commerce features easily extended with microservices.
Mirek Mencel, CEO of Saleor, expressed excitement about welcoming Target Global and Zalando to the Saleor team.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Target Global and Zalando to the Saleor team.” Said Mencel, “With the new capital, we’ll further establish Saleor as the most composable, multimarket-ready platform available while keeping the dev community at the heart of what we do. We’ll help developers deliver business value for their companies more quickly and reliably than ever.”
Lina Chong, Partner at Target Global, commented on their commitment to backing innovative ventures, adding, “Saleor’s thriving open-source community, robust SaaS offering, and forward-thinking vision harmonize seamlessly with our thesis on global commerce businesses.”
Jan Bartels, SVP B2B at Zalando, shared the company’s desire to offer brands and retailers a holistic solution for their multi-channel sales. Acknowledging the crucial role of brands’ own online stores, they see Saleor as a good fit with Zalando’s independently operated ‘ZEOS’ unit. Bartels stated, “With ZEOS, we want to offer brands and retailers a holistic solution for their multi-channel sales. The brands’ own online stores play an important role in this. Here we see a great fit with Saleor’s vision, offering and expertise, which can also help us to further expand our capabilities, for example, in exposing our convenient delivery options to the Saleor checkout.”
