Steve Case's Venture Fund Leads $40 Million Funding Round For Austalia-Based E-Commerce Startup
Australian-born e-commerce platform Bigcommerce has raised a whopping $40 million from US venture fund Revolution Growth to fund technology improvements and a hiring spree in Sydney and Austin, Texas.
The Series C funding round brings Bigcommerce’s total amount of funding to $75 million and sees Revolution Growth founder and former AOL CEO Steve Case join the board with a minority stake.
Bigcommerce was founded in 2009 by Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper. It allows businesses to build and manage e-commerce websites for $25-$300 a month and has about 36,000 clients currently.
“We bootstrapped the business ourselves off the back of credit cards,” Machaalani told Business Insider.
“In 2011 we raised $15 million in a Series A funding round from General Catalyst. In 2012 General Catalyst led a $20 million Series B investment round, which also included Mike Maples of Floodgate and one of the early investors in Twitter.
“We keep close relationships with investors we feel will add value to the business regardless of whether we’re raising or not. When we decided to raise another round of financing, we had spent a lot of time with Steve Case and the Revolution family and knew there would be a great fit.
“Revolution Growth offers a lot more than just the capital – there is experience, advice and also a great network we can leverage to build the business even faster.”
With the $40 million investment, announced tonight, Machaalani and Harper plan to grow from 260 to 400 staff by mid-2014 and build new features that will allow clients to integrate their Bigcommerce stores with existing marketing, inventory, analytics and order management software.
While more than 65% of Bigcommerce clients are located in North America, Harper told Business Insider that the founders “love being a part of [the Australian startup scene], where we’re always meeting great entrepreneurs”.
“There is also a thriving investment scene, but it tends to be at the earlier (seed and series A) stages,” he noted.
“For bigger fundraising at later rounds, the market in the US is significantly larger. The larger venture capitalists in the US, like Revolution Growth, have great experience in taking B2B software businesses from helping tens of thousands of small businesses, to helping hundreds of thousands, and even millions of customers.”
Forbes reported earlier this month that Bigcommerce claims to have facilitated some $2 billion of online sales by clients since 2009, and expects to facilitate $3 billion by the beginning of 2014.