Elastic Path Software Inc. most certainly won’t be closing out the holiday season with a lump of coal in its stocking.
The Vancouver software firm, which specializes in back-end software for e-commerce platforms, revealed Tuesday that it’s raised another $30 million in a funding round led by existing investor Sageview Capital. This comes after Elastic Path raised a separate $60 million earlier this year.
“We feel terrific about it right now,” Elastic Path CEO Jamus Driscoll told BIV. “We [the global economy] are in a somewhat turbulent time. That said, what we are selling is fundamental to business growth and business strategies, and everyone's strategy hinges around digital-first … So we're very much offering something highly differentiated with a lot of customer success behind us.”
The company will be using the fresh capital to improve its “composable” commerce offerings to brands. Composable commerce is a relatively new concept, referring to efforts to make it easier for brands to assemble or “compose” different e-commerce functions from different vendors.
Driscoll likened typical e-commerce offerings to a die-cast toy whose parts can’t be moved. Composable commerce, he said, is more akin to toy Lego pieces that can be easily moved around and modified to create a desired shape.
Driscoll said this allows brands to easily adjust their e-commerce features for customers, such as the shopping cart, check-out, promotions, orders and overall product experience management.
“Think about the way an e-commerce catalogue was built in the past. It was really just a simple database structure, where the idea was I would put my product description, my product name and my price in a database and that would present up to my website,” he said.
“What brands need now is the ability to have far more flexibility and control over that. So I may want to send just a sub-segment of my catalogue with a special negotiated price to my b2b buyers. That was really hard to do with the old model.”
Driscoll said Elastic Path will also be using the investment capital to boost sales and marketing in a bid to go even deeper into biggest markets: Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.
This year marked the release of more than 200 products for Elastic Path’s clients, while its own product bookings grew 200 per cent year over year, according to the company.
Elastic Path’s clients have included financial software firm Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq:INTU), shoe company Deckers Outdoor Corp. (NYSE:DECK) and wireless provider T-Mobile US Inc. (Nasdaq:TMUS).
Elastic Path opened a Toronto office in 2018 amid a Series B funding round that raised $43 million. A few months prior to that the company revealed it had been experiencing 100 per cent year-over-year growth in Europe, where customers included the telecommunications company Swisscom AG and French electronics retailer Boulanger.
Just prior to the pandemic, it acquired U.S. tech company Moltin Ltd., which expanded its geographic footprint with offices in Boston and the U.K.
Driscoll served as Moltin's CEO before taking the helm of Elastic Path a few months after the acquisition.
The company had 220 workers on its global roster as of 2020.
Driscoll declined to share the current headcount, instead referring BIV to Elastic Path’s LinkedIn profile, which states the company has between 201 and 500 employees.
