After a mighty e-commerce boom and a lengthy pandemic, it’s little surprise that the retail landscape has changed dramatically in recent years.
And while consumers have easily adopted shopping online, clicking on personalized ads and opting to receive their orders by mail or in-store, the digital transition hasn’t been easy for many brands.
That’s why investors have bet big on Akeneo, which recently raised an additional $135 million in funding during a Series D. Akeneo’s e-commerce platform was built to streamline product information management (PIM) and product experience management (PXM) systems for brands, allowing them to more easily organize their product information, enhance the customer experience and sell in multiple virtual storefronts.
Akeneo has gained some impressive traction since its founding in 2013, with more than 500 enterprise customers on its roster and ambitious plans to continue expanding globally. That being said, CEO and cofounder Fred de Gombert said his team is just getting started. Here’s how an extra $135 million will help his team advance their roadmap and continue shaping the future of retail.
Tell us a bit about your recent funding round. How much did you raise, and how much funding has your company now raised in total?
In March 2022, we announced the close of our $135 million Series D. The round was led by global equity growth investor Summit Partners, with participation from our existing investors Alven and Partech.
In September 2019, we closed a $46 million Series C, bringing the company’s total funding to $196 million.
A deeper dive into Akeneo’s success
Why did your team feel that the time was right to raise a new round of funding?
The retail landscape is changing quickly. In order to manage these evolving dynamics, we have to invest in creating product experiences that provide richer, more relevant content to the end customer, regardless of where they are buying. To date, we have had more than 80,000 installations of our open-source solution, showing that brands and retailers are becoming as invested in building and managing their product information as they are in managing customer information. We want to meet that demand.
Additionally, Akeneo now has more than 600 customers across 40 countries, has grown its headcount to over 300 employees across nine countries and has expanded its partner ecosystem by 30 percent in 2021 alone. The company has seen remarkable growth in the past two years, so this funding round was imperative to keep up with the overall traction in the market.
How do you plan to utilize this new capital?
The new capital will be used to fuel our continued momentum through an accelerated product development roadmap, key executive hires and expansion of Akeneo’s strategic partnerships.
Our ultimate goal is to bring to market new offerings that consolidate this more dynamic and complete picture of product information alongside powerful analytics and insights. We plan to develop our flagship product experience management platform, PXM Studio, further by incorporating key product information, such as real-time product availability and inventory, dynamic pricing, order management, competitive product insights, merchandising information and user-generated content. We will also allocate funds to grow the team substantially in 2022 by hiring more than 150 new employees across all business units and regions, while expanding our reach in key markets across the globe.
