Today marks another chapter in an exciting story. As we announced this morning, Bloomreach has just raised $175 million in our latest round of funding. I’m proud to welcome Goldman Sachs Asset Management, which led the investment, to the Bloomreach family, and am grateful for the ongoing support of Bain Capital Ventures and Sixth Street Growth (respectively our oldest and newest investors). Thank you for betting $175 million on Bloomreach and validating our opportunity with a $2.2 billion valuation.
While this chapter may be about the investors, the capital, and the valuation, the greater story being written here is actually much more interesting.
It starts in the early days of the web, with Amazon and eBay, when ecommerce was in its infancy. Twenty years later, ecommerce is exactly where we would expect a 20-year-old to be — just getting started. Indeed, at Bloomreach, we believe that if the first 20 years of ecommerce have been about standing up the store, or simply transacting online, then the next twenty years are about standing out from the crowd, or differentiating in the face of increased digital competition and rising consumer expectation.
And so our teams at Bloomreach have become the authors of this new story of ecommerce, devoting ourselves to the single-minded pursuit of architecting the world’s number one Commerce Experience Cloud. The villains of the story are the tired old siloed technologies built in the 1990s: rudimentary marketing automation systems, monolithic commerce platforms, manual search technologies, and heavy weight content systems that prevent our heroes from delivering growth. The heroes, of course, are the marketers, merchandisers, developers, and ecommerce executives who toil every day to build winning experiences in partnership with us at Bloomreach — thousands of you at the world’s best brands.
With this new chapter, the stage is set to go after a $21 billion market, growing soon to $38 billion in ecommerce experience software spending. We get there by pouring more and more fuel on the Bloomreach commitment culture, where Bloomreachers come to have the most impactful professional experience of their careers and achieve unbelievable feats in the process. With their commitment, Bloomreach remains focused on what makes our offering unique:
-
A “best of pillar” strategy where we commit to ensuring each of our pillars (Discovery, Content, and Engagement) modularly remain best in class, while coming together to offer a “commerce experience cloud” that delivers truly democratized personalization
-
A focus on commerce grounded in the belief that commerce experiences deserve unique technology, offerings, best practices, and expertise
-
A unique data platform — the only one of its kind that brings together a deep knowledge of products and customers
So where do we go from here with a fresh infusion of $175 million?
Put simply, the story unfolds a lot faster. You can expect us to deepen our investments in our data platform and ecosystem. You will see us in more and more geographies internationally. You will see each of our pillars win in all segments of the market (mid-market and enterprise). You will see more and more innovative ecommerce use cases that get past technology silos like CDP, CMS, Search, or Marketing Automation, and make it easy for practitioners to build personalized experiences that exactly match the way people shop and buy.
And finally, you’ll see us use the economic value we create to not only grow commerce, but to also fundamentally increase the rate at which commerce changes lives. Like I said, the greater story here is far more interesting.
So welcome, Goldman Sachs, and thank you to everyone who has been part of this story so far. Thirteen years after co-founding Bloomreach, I can tell you that the plot is just starting to thicken.