As shopping experiences continue to take new forms—think social media, smart televisions, virtual assistants, and video games—the complexity of building and managing multi-faceted e-commerce systems is growing.
That creates opportunities for companies like Moltin, a startup that develops cloud-based software tools that power the back-end infrastructure of e-commerce applications. Its application programming interfaces (APIs) and software dashboard help brands and retailers manage their inventory, online shopping carts, payments, and more, while aiming to make it easier for them to turn their interactions with consumers into sales. Now, investors are giving Boston-based Moltin a fresh capital infusion as it aims to grow its business and take on rivals like Shopify and Magento.
On Tuesday, Moltin announced it scored an $8 million Series A round led by Boston-based Underscore VC. Connect Ventures and Frontline Ventures also invested, according to a press release. Moltin said it has hauled in $10 million in venture capital to date.
The company has also brought on Jamus Driscoll as CEO. Most recently, Driscoll was an entrepreneur in residence at Underscore, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before that, he was an executive at Demandware, the Boston-area e-commerce software company that went public in 2012 and was acquired by Salesforce for $2.8 billion in 2016. Underscore founding partner Michael Skok was a Demandware board member and co-led North Bridge Venture Partners’ investment in that company, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Now, Driscoll and Skok will try to help Moltin reach similar heights in e-commerce’s next phase.
“We are entering a new era of commerce and you won’t even see it,” Skok (pictured left) said in a prepared statement. “It will be invisibly embedded into our daily lives, without technology obscuring the brand experience. It will be completely seamless and just an API call for the developer. It’s this level of transformation that Moltin enables.”
In an e-mail to Xconomy, Driscoll described how Moltin’s software tools help brands and retailers “embed commerce into any digital experience” or consumer “touchpoint.”
“Consumers may interact with a brand via a mobile app, a wearable device, a social application such as Instagram, an e-mail, a digital display in a store, a magic mirror—the possibilities are endless,” Driscoll said. “Today, many retailers leverage these channels to engage the consumers with brand experiences and product information,” but consumers don’t always have the ability to immediately make purchases directly on those channels.
That’s where Moltin comes in. Its software can, for example, enable purchases within an online chat window or e-mail, instead of redirecting consumers to a shopping cart on a separate website. Or, say, a mobile app for a sporting event could be configured so that attendees could order a burger from their seats, Driscoll said.
Moltin was founded in 2013 in the U.K. by software developers Jamie Holdroyd, Adam Sturrock, and Chris Roach. Two years later, their company went through the Y Combinator startup accelerator program in the San Francisco Bay Area. Moltin has since established its headquarters in Boston, and it also has offices in the U.K. The 26-employee company plans to double the size of its staff in the next year, Driscoll said.
Underscore’s other investments in marketing tech and e-commerce include Salsify, Zaius, and Mautic.
[In the top photo, Roach (left) and Sturrock (center) are sitting with Driscoll. Photo courtesy of Moltin.]
