E-commerce platform Moltin has closed a $8 million Series A round of financing led by Boston-based Underscore VC. Existing European investors Connect Ventures, which is headquartered in London, and Frontline Ventures, which has offices in London and Dublin, also participated in the round. The company is headquartered in Boston and has offices in Newcastle, U.K.
As part of the funding announcement, the company is bringing in a new CEO, Jamus Driscoll. Driscoll held executive roles at Demandware, another commerce platform company that went public in 2012 and was acquired by Salesforce for $2.8 billion four years later.
When launching Moltin as a startup, co-founders Adam Sturrock, Chris Roach and Jamie Holdroyd brought their approach as developers to the e-commerce market. From a technical standpoint, they realized that e-commerce platforms often hinder a brand’s creative freedom due to the limitations of rigid templates, programming languages and steep learning curves. As a result, they pitched Moltin as a platform that provides organizations with ultimate flexibility and gives developers a simpler API to work with.
Currently, Moltin has built a community of more than 17,000 developers.
"The future of commerce is where brand inspiration and consumer transactions meet," Driscoll said in a press release. "Moltin has cracked the code on a true, API-first solution that allows brand owners to dream of new experiences, and enables developers to build them quickly and easily embed them into any channel."
Another unique feature of Moltin is the so-called "headless commerce," which connects all the components of a commerce system and enables retailers to deliver holistic experiences to consumers wherever they interact with the brand, including interactive digital displays, social media, smart television, video games or any other touchpoint.
“We are entering a new era of commerce and you won’t even see it,” Michael Skok, co-founder of Underscore VC, said in a statement. “It will be invisibly embedded into our daily lives, without technology obscuring the brand experience. It will be completely seamless and just an API call for the developer. It’s this level of transformation that Moltin enables."
