Accel leads Series B; Sales driven by Shogun platform grew 182% YoY amid e-commerce explosion
Shogun, the leading e-commerce experience platform (eXP), announced that it has raised a $35 million Series B round of funding led by Accel with participation from Initialized Capital, VMG Partners, and Y Combinator.
Several prominent individual investors also participated in the round, including Bryant Chou (CTO at Webflow), Mark Lavelle and Mark Lenhard (former CEO and SVP of Strategy at Magento, respectively), Alex O’Byrne (CEO of We Make Websites, a leading Shopify agency), Brian Grady (CEO of Gorilla Group, a leading Magento agency), and Romain Lapeyre (CEO of Gorgias).
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Consumers and merchants are flocking to e-commerce amid the COVID-19 pandemic, fueling $94 billion in extra online spending since March. Shogun’s no-code solution has seen surging demand in recent months, with thousands of new customers and sales driven by the Shogun platform growing 182% YoY.
Seamlessly integrated on top of platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce, Magento and Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shogun empowers brands and agencies to create unique e-commerce experiences by making it easy to build and optimize online storefronts in a no-code environment. Shogun has two core products: Page Builder, an e-commerce focused drag-and-drop page builder, and Frontend, an end-to-end “headless commerce” solution with enterprise-grade content management tooling and lightning-fast page performance. With the increase in demand from direct-to-consumer brands and traditionally offline brands needing to engage directly with their customers, Shogun will use the funding to scale their platform and further develop existing products, in addition to building out sales and marketing, executive and engineering teams.
Shogun is trusted by over 15,000 e-commerce brands, including local mom-and-pop upstarts, to leading DTC brands like Leesa, MVMT, Timbuk2 and Chubbies, to household Fortune 500 brands. Shogun’s customers have used Shogun’s Page Builder to create more than a million web pages and generate billions in sales. The company has achieved a 4.8 rating across more than 2,100 reviews on the Shopify App Store and is featured in the exclusive Shopify Plus Certified App Program for large merchants.
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“Shogun is paving the way for the next generation of e-commerce experiences,” said Ethan Choi, partner at Accel. “The pandemic has accelerated the demand for amazing online shopping experiences, moving e-commerce from a necessary part of merchant strategy to a critical lifeline for businesses. To compete against industry titans like Amazon, merchants must deliver unique experiences, speed and ease-of-use that historically required a full team of engineers to deliver and maintain. As we’ve spoken to over 100 merchants, agency partners, and the major e-commerce platforms, the two problems we consistently heard merchants face were site speed and the need for more design control. Shogun was consistently highlighted as the leading solution to both of these problems. Being investors in two leading broader drag-and-drop web design platforms in Squarespace and Webflow, we are excited to partner with Shogun, the leading equivalent in e-commerce.”
“We’re redefining what it means to have an exceptional online storefront,” said Finbarr Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Shogun. “Advancements in mobile shopping have driven consumers’ expectations for an app-like shopping experience even when browsing the mobile web, but many merchants outside of the behemoths have historically lacked the necessary tools to compete. Shogun’s e-commerce experience platform is designed to help any merchant harness the power of the latest ‘headless commerce’ technology to quickly create flexible themes and memorable online experiences that directly boost the bottom line. By eliminating the technical hassle, they can focus on what really matters.”
“With limited coding knowledge, we have relied on Shogun’s Page Builder to create and efficiently deploy on-the-fly updates to hundreds of pages, saving us an immense amount of time and money,” said Brian Hahn, co-founder of NOMAD. “We’ve decided to upgrade to their new product, Shogun Frontend, because of the incredible results e-commerce companies are seeing from increased page speed, as well as the enterprise-grade content management tools it provides.”
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