Swell Commerce, a leading headless commerce platform serving fast growing businesses, announced it has raised a $20M Series A funding round led by VMG Catalyst and Headline.
The global company, which aims to put an end to merchant replatforming, will use the funds to accelerate adoption and to develop an ecosystem of apps, themes, integrations and merchant solutions. Swell plans to hire across key areas, including product, engineering, design, support, sales and marketing.
Swell’s native features, such as subscription management and localization, enable sophisticated use cases without requiring custom development. For merchants seeking more control, the platform’s API-first architecture and customizable data models enable powerful capabilities.
“This investment is validation for us and confirms that the market sees our vision and is excited about our customers’ stories,” says Swell co-founder and CEO, Eric Ingram. “We are building for the future of commerce, and this funding round will allow us to scale our remote-first team so that we can better serve the needs of leading brands and ecommerce merchants.”
The funding round includes participation from previous investors Bonfire Ventures and Willow Growth, and from first-time Swell investor Commerce Ventures. Other notable investors in the Series A round include Brian Long (CEO of Attentive), Romain Lapeyre (CEO of Gorgias) and Andreas Klinger (Remote First Capital and former CTO of Product Hunt). Carle Stenmark, partner at VMG Catalyst, will join the Board of Directors.
In conjunction with the Series A funding, Swell announced the hiring of Kevin McKeand as Chief Commercial Officer. McKeand has more than a decade of experience leading high performing teams across sales, business development and partnerships, including at BigCommerce where he led a team managing over 800 partnerships with companies such as Google, Amazon, PayPal, Stripe, ShipStation and many others. Most recently, he led the business development and partnership teams at Zip, a global buy now, pay later provider.
Ecommerce in 2022: “To stand out, you need to sell creatively”
In the past two years, global ecommerce growth has accelerated as retail spending has rapidly shifted away from the brick-and-mortar channel. In the third quarter of 2021, digital orders accounted for more than $1 in every $6 spent on retail purchases.
In 2022 and beyond, this trend is expected to continue as shoppers increasingly engage with brands in digital channels. Marketplace models, subscription commerce and the convergence of digital and in-store channels create unique challenges for merchants. At the forefront of these trends is a need for storefront personalization, and Swell is leading the way with customizable themes, flexible APIs and modern developer workflows.
“It’s not enough nowadays to just offer ecommerce as a touchpoint. To stand out, you need to sell creatively,” says Ingram.
“We’ve seen our customers sell state-of-the-art vacuums through B2B commerce, or sell subscription coffee beans via a fully connected IoT marketplace. We will continue to invest in many areas of the platform and know that winning over the hearts and minds of online store developers is key to realizing Swell’s world-changing opportunity.”
Headless ecommerce for everyone
Swell’s mission is to build an ecommerce platform using headless architecture “that everyone can use.”
“For me personally, regardless of our financial success, I am excited to solve this problem with the ecommerce community and to make sure that everyone can have access to a platform as powerful as Swell,” says Ingram.
“Right now at Swell, we’re on track to do that and that’s the most exciting thing.”
