B2B Platform Nautical Commerce Raises $30M

Multi-vendor marketplace platform Nautical Commerce announced Wednesday (June 29) that it has raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Drive Capital.

The round also saw participation from returning investors Accomplice Ventures and Golden Ventures, according to a company press release.

Nautical Commerce was founded by former executives from Apple, Top Hat, TouchBistro and Visa. Per the release, Masha Khusid from Drive Capital will also join the Nautical board of directors.

Nautical stated in its announcement that it will use the funds to continue developing its multi-vendor platform and hire staff members in engineer, product and customer success roles. The company expects to add 40 staff over the next 18 months.

In addition, Nautical said it will use the new capital to enter undisclosed new markets. Per the release, the company already operates in the United States, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Australia and France, with customers in in the fashion, health, automotive, home goods, sustainable goods and manufacturing sectors.

“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,” said Ryan Lee, founder and chief executive of Nautical Commerce. “And we’ve seen others with large development teams and limitless capital spend millions to launch or scale a marketplace — without success.

“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.”

Nautical said it also has customers in the retail and B2B sectors, including established players and startups.

The B2B eCommerce space has been heating up this year, and Shopify recently entered the space in a bid to expand its total addressable market.

See also: Shopify Enters B2B eCommerce Market to Compete with Amazon

Shopify said it didn’t want to “just go after direct-to-consumer businesses, big and small,” instead pivoting to address the “wholesale business, which is a huge untapped market.”