Web-building startup Duda has acquired e-commerce tech company Snipcart as the former company’s first deal.
Snipcart is headquartered in Québec City and has been operating since 2013. The startup offers an online shopping cart solution for businesses looking to implement e-commerce transactions. All 12 Snipcart employees, including CEO Francois Lanthier Nadeau, will be joining Duda and the companies will be fully integrated by 2022.
Its acquisition follows California-based Duda raising $50 million USD from a Series D round funding in June which brings the company’s total funding to $100 million to date.
Founded in 2009, Duda provides a website development platform and client management tools. In 2020, the company also launched the Duda University program, a free online resource for people looking to learn more about web design and digital marketing.
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Duda’s co-founder and CEO Itai Sadan said that acquiring Snipcart was driven by the company seeing a boost in e-commerce websites as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to a 2021 report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the pandemic caused an increase in demand for online shopping due to quarantine restrictions implemented by many countries.
“Overall retail sales declined by 1 percent in this group of countries in 2020 while online retail grew by 22 percent,” the report states. Global e-commerce sales also jumped to $26.7 trillion USD in 2019, up four percent from 2018.
“These statistics show the growing importance of online activities,” said Shamika Sirimanne, UNCTAD’s director of technology and logistics, in the report. “They also point to the need for countries, especially developing ones, to have such information as they rebuild their economies in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Since the pandemic panic-buying of groceries in March 2020 (that led to a toilet paper shortage in Canada and the United States), many shoppers turned to online shopping to purchase their goods from the safety of their own homes. This event witnessed a surge of online grocery orders according to Rakuten Intelligence data reported by Digital Commerce 360