Copenhagen-based startup Medusa has collected $8 million in a seed round led by LocalGlobe and Dawn Capital. The round also saw participation from prominent tech leaders such as Anthony Casalena, Nicolas Dessaigne, and Scott Williamson. The open source composable commerce engine provides the foundational building blocks for tomorrow’s e-commerce infrastructure by combining its open architecture and a headless e-commerce setup. Founded last summer where it raised its pre-seed with Seedcamp, the startup operates remotely but is incorporated in Denmark and will move the company along with part of the team to the US as part of the seed financing. This funding also enables Medusa to strenghten its existing product and developer experience.
Medusa Raises $8m to Build the Leading E-Commerce Platform for Developers
Medusa closes Seed round after seeing record growth among Javascript developer community for its open-source alternative to Shopify
Medusa, the leading e-commerce platform for Javascript developers, announced it has raised an $8m USD Seed round led by LocalGlobe and Dawn Capital, with participation of prominent tech leaders such as Anthony Casalena (Squarespace CEO & founder), Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia founder), and Scott Williamson (Ex-CPO Gitlab). Medusa has created unparalleled growth in the developer community, becoming the most starred Javascript e-commerce platform on GitHub in only eight months, surpassing established solutions such as WooCommerce and Magento.
Medusa solves the pains of merchants wanting to create unique customer experiences and optimize operations. It provides similar core functionality as Shopify out-of-the-box, while its open abstraction-based architecture makes customizations and maintenance much easier to handle for developers as businesses’ needs evolve. The platform gives merchants control of their stack by easily connecting to APIs of payment providers, logistics tools, CMSs, and other systems while enabling a native omnichannel setup through its headless architecture.
“Medusa immediately attracted our attention with their unique open-source product. Balancing the right level of a user-friendly API-first approach with a great degree of customizability, Medusa’s product is a dream for developers and merchants who need to customize their platforms while maintaining maximum performance and response times,” said Mina Mutafchieva, partner at Dawn.
“For all the breakneck innovation we have seen in the frontend, the majority of e-commerce sites sit on legacy platforms, such as Magento, CommerceCloud, etc. Even Shopify, which has transformed access to e-commerce for smaller merchants, is already 15 years old. As a result, the pain points for e-commerce merchants are exploding and most, if not all, we at Dawn have spoken to in the last two years, use inefficient “work-arounds” to achieve their business goals.”
From the get-go, Medusa has devoted its focus to building an excellent solution for developers, viewing them as key to unlocking merchant success.
“Merchants need to stand out among the crowd and optimize their operations to continue growing in the increasingly competitive e-commerce space. Developers are key to enabling the unique digital commerce experiences that are needed in today’s landscape so we focus on building the best tools possible for developers to be more efficient,” explains Sebastian Rindom, CEO and co-founder of Medusa.
The developer-centric approach is likewise one of the reasons why LocalGlobe holds faith in Medusa’s platform.
“With its open-source approach based on Javascript, we think the Medusa team is building the most powerful platform to power the next generation of e-commerce experiences as demonstrated by the fact that developers love the product and are adopting it at an unprecedented rate,” said George Henry, general partner at LocalGlobe.
Medusa is already being implemented at webshops selling +$100m annually. It has been estimated that the total addressable market in 2021 was $15bn to $25bn, with a potential to grow to $18bn to $32bn in 2025.
“Our level of extensibility and customizability allows developers to build powerful commerce setups without compromising the scalability of their business. We see users leveraging Medusa’s composable architecture to power everything from regular D2C brands to advanced subscription products, marketplaces, and B2B businesses,” says Oliver Juhl, CTO & co-founder of Medusa.
With the fundraising, the team will put more resources towards strengthening the core product and further enriching the developer experience. In addition, Medusa has started offering premium support for agencies and in-house developer teams building on the platform.
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