The startup sector churned out one unicorn after the other last year and this trend has not stopped with 2022. Although we have not reached the heights of 2021, it does not seem inconceivable that 2022 will do an encore, if not better. The newest addition in the coveted club is e-commerce SaaS startup CommerceIQ, which entered the league after raising $115 million in its Series D financing round. It was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and included participation from existing institutional investors Insight Partners, Trinity Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Madrona Venture Group.
With this, the company reached a valuation of over $1 billion (the threshold for becoming a unicorn) and has raised $175 million in the past 12 months.
The proceeds from the round will be deployed towards fuelling international expansion and boosting the development of its unified retail e-commerce management platform. Additionally, funds will be used to drive recruitment in India and expand across software development, data science & analytics, product operations, and customer support. In the future, it also plans to go deeper by building 8-10 products onto its software.
CommerceIQ now joins an increasing list that includes names such as Mamaearth, Fractal, Darwinbox, Dealshare, Xpressbees, Hasura, and CredAvenue. It is certainly too early to tell whether it will be as successful as 2021 in terms of producing unicorns, but it is certainly on the right path.
CommerceIQ, founded in 2012, is a worthy addition to the list. In today’s world, e-commerce is booming and titans such as Amazon and Flipkart are penetrating deeper into the market. And with e-commerce comes algorithms, which are driving retail today. This leads to new challenges being faced by traditional consumer brands, and it is those challenges that CommerceIQ looks to address.
It claims to be the “only enterprise platform for the world’s largest brands that integrate data across sales, marketing, and operations and takes into account competitive and market dynamics to turbocharge your team with automation that makes time-consuming, repetitive tasks a thing of the past.”
With technology such as machine learning, analytics, and automation, it aggregates data across sales, marketing, and supply chain operations to help brands gain shoppers at the moment of purchase, maintain customer loyalty, and prevent revenue leakage. Today, it claims to have over 2,200 companies as clients, including Nestle, Colgate, Kellogg’s, and Whirlpool. It charges an annual subscription, which is based on the client’s business.
