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Taking a business online involves technology and people, two things that not every small business can swing.
Enter Webscale, a multicloud SaaS tool that provides access to technology enabling e-commerce businesses of all sizes to automate their processes on the cloud securely, Webscale CEO Sonal Puri told Crunchbase News.
“We are focused on security and performance for e-commerce brands, so they can compete with Amazon without a massive investment in technology and people,” Puri said.
The Santa Clara, California-based company recently closed on $26 million in Series C funding led by BGV, STCAP Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures, with participation from Grotech Ventures.
The new funding gives Webscale a total of $56.3 million in known venture-backed investments since the company was founded in 2012, according to Crunchbase data. Prior to this raise, the company brought in $14 million in Series B funding in 2019, led by Mohr Davidow.
Data shows global e-commerce sales are poised to reach record numbers by 2022, with revenue expected to grow to $6.54 trillion.
Market
Retail and e-commerce are two of the areas being disrupted by technology and data, Anik Bose, general partner at BGV, said in an interview. He was impressed by Webscale’s vision, core technology and team, saying the company was successful at going after the e-commerce market before it was at the scale it is today.
“Webscale is riding two trends: the first is the transition to the cloud, helping companies that are trying to leverage the technology, but don’t have the resources,” Bose added. “The other is security being a bigger problem. As there was a surge in e-commerce, online crime went through the roof. There is a massive opportunity for Webscale and others to service these in an automated way.”
One of the buzzwords in that growing e-commerce space lately is the concept of “headless commerce.”
Puri explained that merchants don’t always have the ease of technology deployment or the ability to be agile, so headless commerce is a way to split out the front end — the customer-facing portions — and back end, essentially the nuts and bolts of the operation.
“The market is demanding a new look and feel,” she added. “We see ourselves as a secure headless commerce enabler for merchants to split the front end and back end securely, and with the flexibility of deploying with the flip of a switch.”
Growth
Although the company was founded in 2012, Webscale didn’t begin scaling until 2015, Puri said. It went after a Series C as it was seeing significant growth in 2020 amid powering thousands of storefronts, including Fortune 1000 brands such as Dollar General. It ultimately grew 108 percent in 2020, according to Puri.
“COVID accelerated our business like you cannot imagine. We were a young Series B company, and seeing customers, like Dollar General, leverage our platform to do what they do,” she added. “We believed that if we didn’t reach these customers during their pain points or growth, they were going to miss out on leveraging our platform.”
Webscale intends to deploy the funding into sales and marketing efforts, as well as boost its sales team across the world, R&D, and new features and functionalities. The company operates e-commerce storefronts across 10 countries, and in addition to its office in Santa Clara, has offices in Boulder, Colorado; San Antonio, Texas; Bangalore, India; and London.
