Bigcommerce raises $50 million in Series D funding led by SoftBank Capital

Australian startup Bigcommerce, the ecommerce platform of choice for fast-growing brands, has announced it has raised $50 million in Series D funding. The company will use the funds to invest in product development, aggressively grow sales and marketing, and expand its business to new markets.

The financing was led by SoftBank Capital, a venture firm affiliated with SoftBank Corp, and included Telstra Ventures and American Express, as well as existing investors General Catalyst and Revolution Growth. Steve Murray, a partner at SoftBank Capital, will join the Bigcommerce board.

Bigcommerce co-founder Eddie Machaalani says partnering with Softbank will help give the startup access to the growing Asian market, and opportunities within Softbank Group companies, including Alibaba.

“With this new round of funding, we will continue to level the commerce playing field so that every merchant has the opportunity to build a compelling brand and scalable business to effectively compete with the largest players in their industry,” he says.

E-commerce as a segment of the total retail market is growing at 30 percent per year and is expected to reach $2 trillion in sales worldwide in 2015, according to Bigcommerce research. The company has seen significant year-over-year revenue growth and is approaching $5 billion in total online sales across merchants.

Over the past year, Bigcommerce signed several new agreements to provide clients with next-generation ecommerce functionality:

Bigcommerce recently announced the industry’s first open mPOS platform with Lightspeed POS and NCR Silver joining as launch partners to provide merchants with best-in-class, omni-channel solutions for businesses selling both online and in-store.

Also this month, Bigcommerce launched as a founding developer partner with Poynt — the world’s first smart payment terminal targeting the 16 million merchants that will be upgrading ahead of the 2015 EMV mandate.

In October, Bigcommerce announced a new partnership with Alibaba to streamline product sourcing for merchants. SoftBank Corp is a one-third owner of Alibaba.

In July, Magento, an eBay Enterprise company, selected Bigcommerce as a SaaS ecommerce migration provider for its ProStores and Magento Go platform discontinuation.

Earlier this year, Bigcommerce partnered with Endurance International Group’s Homestead brand to re-launch 6,700 of their merchants’ online stores.

Bigcommerce recently added several new features to the platform, including Bigcommerce Analytics, an enterprise-grade real-time reporting tool; the Single Click App Store, an easy way for merchants to integrate their store with the other software they use to run their business; one-click payments setup, where merchants can set up popular payment options like PayPal and Stripe; and a new theme store packed with dozens of new free and premium themes.

American Express vice president, US small merchants, Tyler Vaughey says the investment forms part of the company’s commitment to equipping small businesses with resources that can help them grow.

“With the convergence of online and offline, many small merchants are looking for ways to strengthen customer engagement, and Bigcommerce has created a platform that enables merchants to address this key business objective,” he says.

Follow StartupSmart on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.