E-commerce software startup CommerceIQ Inc. today announced that it has closed a $115 million funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at a valuation exceeding $1 billion.

All the startup’s existing institutional investors participated as well. The group included Insight Partners, Trinity Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Madrona Venture Group.

For consumer brands, selling a product through e-commerce marketplaces such as Amazon involves a significant amount of manual work. Workers have to coordinate product shipping, ensure that the price of each item is listed correctly, run ads and perform a variety of other tasks. CommerceIQ offers a cloud platform that enables brands to carry out many of the core tasks involved in their e-commerce operations through a single, centralized platform.

One of CommerceIQ’s focus areas is helping companies remediate operational errors that may negatively affect sales.

There are cases where a product listing may accidentally indicate that an item is out of stock when it’s in fact available. Similarly, data entry errors can lead to a product’s price being set higher or lower than it should be. CommerceIQ’s platform can automatically detect such issues, sparing companies the hassle of manually monitoring their e-commerce product listings. 

To simplify supply chain tasks, CommerceIQ provides a tool that enables brands to track product shipments and identify delays. A complementary sales forecasting feature makes it possible to anticipate future demand for a given product. Companies can align the amount of merchandise they purchase from suppliers with the future demand predicted by CommerceIQ to optimize costs.

Consumer brands run online ad campaigns to increase demand for their products. A company that leverages CommerceIQ’s platform to support its e-commerce operations can use a set of analytics features provided by the startup to measure the effectiveness of its ad campaigns. CommerceIQ also helps generate product promotions such as discounts: The startup uses machine learning to optimize a company’s promotions based on historical pricing and sales data. 

“Our mission is to empower brands to move from analog to algorithms,” said CommerceIQ Chief Executive Officer Guru Hariharan. “Winners in this new era of commerce will be determined by how fast they can reinvent their business from siloed and manual to fully connected and automated.”

More than 2,200 brands have signed up to use CommerceIQ’s platform to date, including Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg Co. and other big names. The startup says that both its revenue and the number of companies using its platform doubled in 2021 thanks to strong demand.

Following the newly announced $115 million funding round, CommerceIQ reportedly plans to grow its international presence as well as potentially invest in acquisitions.

Startups that provide software for online retailers have benefited from the strong growth of the e-commerce segment and the new revenue opportunities created by this growth. In parallel, the increasing popularity of online shopping has also benefited other types of startups. Elevate Brands, officially Recom Brands LLC, closed a $250 million investment last year to acquire and operate e-commerce businesses after several competitors raised funding as well. 

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