Founded and led by former executives from Apple, Visa, Top Hat, and TouchBistro, Nautical is making best-in-class marketplace technology accessible to everyone, from startups to enterprises
Nautical Commerce, the on-demand multi-vendor platform for marketplaces, announced that it raised $30 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Drive Capital, with participation from returning investors Accomplice Ventures and Golden Ventures. Masha Khusid from Drive Capital will join the Nautical board of directors.
Nautical enables retailers, brands, B2B businesses, and startups to quickly launch a company-operated marketplace, with implementations as fast as 90 days, helping increase customer reach without the cost of custom software. To date, Nautical has saved its customers millions of dollars in development costs, while significantly accelerating their digital transformation time to launch.
In 2020, consumers and businesses spent nearly $3 trillion for purchases on the 100 biggest online marketplaces alone — a number that’s predicted to grow by 14% every year. However, legacy commerce platforms that serve today’s marketplaces weren’t designed for the complexity of multiple vendors. Nautical was purpose-built for multi-vendor commerce, giving each player in the marketplace – buyers, sellers, and operators – a curated experience. With Nautical, marketplace operators no longer need to assemble their platforms with a combination of plug-ins or spend millions on custom software.
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“We’re impressed by what Nautical has already accomplished and are proud to enable them to deliver on their mission to democratize marketplace technology.”
“I’ve seen online marketplaces struggle to piece together their tech stack with a collection of apps and software that weren’t designed to address their specific needs. And we’ve seen others with large development teams and limitless capital spend millions to launch or scale a marketplace—without success,” said Ryan Lee, founder and CEO of Nautical Commerce. “Our multi-vendor platform is built to power all the stakeholders that a modern commerce company has to deal with including vendors, sellers, drop-shippers, affiliates, channels, influencers, and more without needing to replatform. Until today, this technology has been largely out of reach. And now we have the capital to expand our reach and continue building out our marketplace platform.”
Nautical experienced significant growth over the past six months. This includes a notable increase in revenue, and the addition of new customers from across the U.S., Canada, United Arab Emirates, Australia, and France spanning several industry verticals, such as fashion, health, automotive, home goods, sustainable goods, and manufacturing.
Nautical will use the funds to further develop its multi-vendor marketplace platform, expand its reach into new markets, and grow its engineering, product, customer success, and sales and marketing teams. Nautical plans to add over 40 new team members over the next 18 months.
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The Nautical executive team has an extensive background in commerce, fintech, and logistics. Lee helped launch Apple Pay around the globe during his tenure at Apple, led product development at fintech startup ModoPayments, and built solutions for B2B logistics at Turvo. Bhavin Shah, Nautical COO and CTO, scaled rapidly growing startups Top Hat and TouchBistro as CTO.
“Ecommerce is becoming more distributed and single-vendor platforms were not built for this multi-vendor future. Ryan and his team built the only multi-vendor ecommerce platform and are serving a huge need in the market,” says Masha Khusid at Drive Capital. “We’re impressed by what Nautical has already accomplished and are proud to enable them to deliver on their mission to democratize marketplace technology.”
“The last two decades saw the unbundling of marketplaces. Marketplace giants are ceding their market share to more curated experiences on sites like StockX, Faire, and Etsy. We expect niche marketplaces to continue to propagate, but existing commerce offerings are ill-equipped to support these types of multi-vendor businesses,” says Ameet Shah, General Partner at Golden Ventures. “Nautical’s ability to quickly set up marketplaces is a huge step forward.”
