For years, every extra dime Michael Lagoni made he reinvested into Stackline, his martech business. The Seattle company bootstrapped and avoided outside funding. But after six years, the business finally took advantage of the opportunity to make some extra bank.
On Thursday, Stackline announced it raised a $50 million Series A round from Goldman Sachs Growth Equity. Lagoni said the cash comes as demand for Stackline’s e-commerce optimization platform is rising during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our business continues to scale,” Lagoni said in a statement. “This investment will help accelerate the important role Stackline plays in allowing our customers to gain a competitive advantage and drive transformational change in how they grow online sales.”
Founded in 2014, Stackline combines data analytics and marketing automation with a team of in-person e-commerce experts to build personalized sales strategies for brands that sell on third-party marketplaces, like Amazon.
The company was founded by a group of Amazon alums including Lagoni, who serves as CEO; Mitch Keidan, director of product; and Raj Ramasamy, chief technology officer. For two years, all the profits from the company’s human minds went into building an artificially intelligent platform. In 2016, Stackline launched its data analytics and automation tool with the aim of centralizing all of a retailer’s sales, advertising and marketing metrics into a single space.
Today, Stackline claims to offer retailers a complete picture of how their online business stacks up against their competitors. The company counts more than 2,000 consumer brands as customers, including Seattle big shots like Microsoft and Starbucks. Stackline said it has helped its customers generate a combined $30 billion in e-commerce sales across the world.
In March, Stackline launched its latest product — named Ad Manager — to automate brand campaigns in real-time on third-party marketplaces. The startup plans to spend the Series A round on continuing to develop this and other tech, as well as scaling globally.
The 95-person company currently has 25 open roles listed on its site, with positions available in engineering, data science, product management and more.
“I’m incredibly proud of our team’s work to build industry-defining technology and very excited about the new innovations we’ll bring to market in the coming years,” Lagoni said.
