October 15, 2024

NORDchinaz

The Business & Finance guru

Vue Storefront Raises $17.4m for E-Commerce Infrastructure

Vue Storefront Raises .4m for E-Commerce Infrastructure
  • Polish company Vue Storefront has raised a $17.4 million Series A in its second round this year. 
  • Founded in 2020, Vue Storefront is a “headless commerce” company to offer flexible and customizable frontend software.
  • We got an exclusive look at the pitch deck it used to raise the cash from Bolt-backers Creandum.

Vue Storefront, a startup that wants to decouple front and back end systems for e-commerce companies, has raised $17.4 million is in its second round of the year. 

“Headless commerce” companies specialize in a plug-and-play frontend which customers interact with, that integrates with third-party backend infrastructure — the head and body, respectively.

Amazon, car company Audi, and water bottle brand Chilly’s each use this strategy.

Founded in 2020, Vue Storefront says it powers “backend agnostic” progressive web applications allowing, it says, retailers and other clients to offer a mobile app-like experience.

Its flexible contracts also mean clients aren’t tied into three-year licence deals.

Cofounder and CEO Patrick Friday sees this as a big selling point. It allows companies to take a modular approach to software without having to overhaul entire systems, he told Insider. 

“The biggest issue [with incumbents] is the second you stop paying the licence, you lose everything,” he said. Vue Storefront allows customers to migrate to different environments and keep “every single line of the code” that the company has written. Clients who cancel would lose some integrations, features, and API management, so development costs would increase, Friday said. He added that it is “crazy” companies get tied into long deals.

Friday and CTO Filip Rakowski created Vue Storefront while at e-commerce agency Divante, starting the project in 2017 but eventually spinning it out in 2019. The cofounders landed a spot on Y Combinator’s 2021 winter cohort, bagging $1.5 million in seed funding before demo day.

It is yet to take part in a demo day after planning to join the summer cohort event instead, but found itself raising a Series A round from inbound interest alone. “We might just do it for fun,” Friday said. With its seed pot not yet dry, Vue Startup is still hiring and will have a team of 50 by the end of next month. 

The Series A was led by Creandum, an early backer of European ride-hailing firm Bolt. European investors Earlybird Venture, Stripe backers Paua Ventures, and Polish early-stage firm Movens Capital also participated in the round. The round took around seven weeks to close, Friday said.

Vue Storefront will use the latest cash injection to scale up its B2B features and marketplace capabilities with a focus on collecting user insight for developers. It plans to hire senior developers and go-to-market teams in the US and APAC region. It is also considering launching in Asia.

See the pitch deck it used to raise the latest round below.

https://www.businessinsider.com/creandum-vue-storefront-headless-commerce-pitch-deck-raise-174-million-2021-10