Austin—BigCommerce, which sells software to allow businesses to build and run online stores, announced Wednesday that it has raised $64 million in new funding.
The investment round was led by Goldman Sachs with participation from current investors General Catalyst, GGV Capital, and Tenaya Capital. With the latest funding, BigCommerce has raised more than $200 million.
Brent Bellm, BigCommerce’s CEO, says the funding will go toward improvements in the company’s core product and also to establish a regional headquarters in Europe, a growing market for BigCommerce.
“We’ve always been a very internationally oriented company from day one,” Bellm says. “We are doing extremely well in Australia, where we began, and growing quite effectively in China, with a partner, who does the translation for local marketing and selling for us. We think that model could be replicated in other parts of Asia.”
Bellm says the next milestone in the company’s growth could be to go public, adding that an IPO “is the next logical step” for BigCommerce.
The company, which was founded in 2009 in Sydney, develops its customers’ online stores and also provides tech tools that accept payments and track sales and shipping. (BigCommerce moved its headquarters to Austin in 2011.) The company also helps retailers and brands to set up e-commerce operations for sales through smartphones and social media sites.
BigCommerce uses a software-as-a-service model to cater companies that do between $1 million and $50 million in annual transactions online, Bellm says. Among its main competitors are Magento, Shopify, and Salesforce.
In addition to expanding the company’s geographic footprint, BigCommerce has also added tools to enable better transactions via mobile—sometimes called “m-commerce”— which is a growing segment of online shopping. For example, BigCommerce last month announced an expanded program that enables shopping on Instagram in the U.S. and also parts of Europe, Brazil, and Australia.
Bellm says that BigCommerce became the first e-commerce platform to natively deploy Akamai Image Manager and Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in order to provide the best display for high-speed transactions via mobile.
“We do things that none of our competitors do, which totally optimizes the speed of the mobile experience,” he says.
