Shopify may have begun seven years ago as an online store for three friends to sell snowboards. But as the company’s growth has exploded, so has its goal: becoming a giant of commerce, both on and off the web.
Now the start-up is receiving a substantial amount of help in that aim.
Shopify plans to announce on Thursday that it has raised $100 million in a Series C round of financing, led by the venture capital arm of the Canadian pension fund OMERS and the investment firm Insight Venture Partners. Also contributing to the round were Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Georgian Partners and Felicis Ventures.
The latest financing is nearly five times the $22 million that the company raised in its previous two rounds, and values it at nearly $1 billion.
It comes as Shopify begins to substantially branch out from its main business, serving as the online retail platform for other companies. Though it began as a way to sell snowboards, it now claims to run more than 80,000 stores, mostly on behalf of small businesses.
And it is still growing. The company says that member stores sold over $100 million worth of products in the week surrounding this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
But Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s chief platform officer, said the company now saw its future in offering customers offline solutions as well. It already offers software that lets clients effectively use iPads as cash registers, somewhat akin to Square’s payment offering.
The idea is that whether the cash register is a phone, a website or a tablet, inventory and other store management issues can be handled seamlessly across platforms.
“We want to go from being an e-commerce company to a commerce company,†he said. “That’s the vision. Sell anything, anywhere, anytime.â€
The push to operate on several channels at once began as a battle cry from traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, who scrambled to get online to avoid losing customers to websites like Amazon. More recently, the tide began to flow in the other direction, as online retailers opened physical stores of their own. Piperlime, for example, has a store in Manhattan’s SoHo, which was designed to seem consistent with the language, fonts and color scheme of its website.
While online shopping has shown strong growth in recent years, the research firm ShopperTrak estimates that over 90 percent of actual commerce still takes place in physical stores, which makes that segment an important target for any company that hopes to serve retailers.
While Shopify does not want to open stores of its own, it has been experimenting with pop-up stores â€" events it calls “Popify†â€" bringing online retailers who use its platform into a physical space so it can study what shoppers do.
The company already knows a lot about what consumers do online, Mr. Finkelstein said. Now “we want to learn as much as we can about consumer interaction offline,†he said.
