Everything in life seems to go in circles: yesterday we sold stuff in a shop, today we do it online and tomorrow we’ll all return offline to sell goods. That’s what Ottawa-based startup Shopify is betting on.
Shopify has raised $100 million in a series C round of venture capital. OMERS Ventures and Insight Venture Partners led the round with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Georgian Partners, and Felicis Ventures. The new capital will help the company fully expand their recently launched offline retail offering.
The company is a commerce platform that has thus far allowed anyone to easily sell online, at their retail location, and everywhere in between. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, and the Shopify POS application to power retail sales.
“Shopify began as an easy way to sell products online. We used our previous funding rounds to expand into new areas that enriched our product and helped our merchants, like payments and mobile,” said CEO Tobias Lütke. “This new round of funding will help us further expand into physical retail with Shopify POS, so our merchants can easily sell their products anywhere at any time.”
The company was founded in 2006 and focused on making it easy for anyone to create an online store. But, just as so many new solutions are trying to assist online shops in their brick-and-mortar escapades, Shopify is on the cusp of facilitating its users’ transition to the physical retail world. It’s a relatively interesting concept that few could have predicated ten years ago, but the push towards offline business is widespread, and it’s happening now.
Of course the startup wants its users to sell product via any medium- online, offline and anywhere in between. And central to its offering is the data aspect that businesses can take advantage of. All of the data revolving around sales, regardless of online or offline, is available for analysis and scrutiny.
“In the past few years Shopify has democratized online retail by delivering the easiest and most robust platform to businesses looking to sell a product. They have demonstrated that they truly understand the future of commerce, and we are very excited to see them conquer the offline retail world as well,” said OMERS Ventures’ Jim Orlando.
The Series C funding adds to the $22 million of Series A and B funding received in 2010 and 2011. The 300-employee company recently signed up its 80,000th customer, while businesses who use Shopify are on track to book more than $1.6 billion in sales this year.