Ecommerce technology provider Stackline has received $130 million in funding from UK-based private equity firm TA Associates, on top of a $50 million investment from Goldman Sachs’ growth equity team in November, using it to create new products, pursue foreign markets and look ahead to an IPO.
Two executives from TA Associates, managing director Jason Mironov and principal Amara Suebsaeng, are joining Stackline’s board.
The deluge of funding into ecommerce-related technologies and supporting services continues unabated, as Stackline joins other 2021 recipients like Tealium and Shippo — both newly minted unicorns — and Flowspace.
Founded in 2014 in Seattle, Stackline’s portfolio provides retailers and brands with competitive intelligence and benchmarking that tracks metrics like market share, pricing, sales and profitability and inventory management, as well as automating ad campaign management and tracking performance.
Among its 2,000-plus brand clients in 200 countries are HP, Starbucks, Mondelez, Levi’s, General Mills, Sony, Google, Philips and Nestle. The company is expected to double its 2020 headcount of 75 this year.
Founder and CEO Michael Lagoni said he realized the massive potential of ecommerce for brands and sectors across the retail ecosystem when working as a senior manager at Amazon after getting his Harvard MBA. He founded Stackline with $300 in his Seattle apartment, and immediately landed Clif Bar and Purell as early clients even before there was a platform, making the company profitable out of the gate.
“What I saw was a wide-open opportunity, with every consumer brand in the world needing better data, software and services to operate in a new industry,” Lagoni said. “Initially, we were just selling services before there was software. We told brands, we know the space very well, and could manually select data and crunch it. Enough of them signed up to hire engineers and data scientists, and a few years later we had our first enterprise SaaS platform.”
He said the funding will fuel innovation and development, including a new tool that will be announced shortly, while TA Associates, with its global reach, will help with expansion into Europe, Asia and Latin America. An IPO is planned “in the next few years,” Lagoni said.
“We wanted to bring on TA Associates to help the company continue to scale globally, and build out more competencies we need for the bigger event, our eventual IPO,” he said.