Startup Nautical Commerce Inc., which provides technology for building e-commerce marketplaces, today said it has secured a $30 million investment led by Drive Capital.

Existing backers Accomplice Ventures and Golden Ventures participated as well. The round brings Nautical Commerce’s total outside funding to $33.2 million.

New York-based Nautical Commerce provides a software platform that promises to reduce the amount of work involved in developing an e-commerce marketplace. In particular, the platform is geared toward building marketplaces that carry merchandise from multiple companies. 

There are many tools that enable retailers to build e-commerce websites. However, there are relatively few tools focused specifically on enabling multiple companies to sell merchandise via the same marketplace. As a result, retailers taking this route historically had to either build custom software or assemble a marketplace from multiple existing products with limited feature sets.

Building an e-commerce marketplace is complicated because each seller on the marketplace often processes customer purchases separately. As a result, sellers require software features that can help them perform tasks such as managing their product listings.

According to Nautical Commerce, its platform simplifies the software development process. The platform promises to provide all the features necessary to build an e-commerce marketplace in a single package. The startup says that it can help retailers build an e-commerce marketplace in as little as 90 days.

“I’ve seen online marketplaces struggle to piece together their tech stack with a collection of apps and software that weren’t designed to address their specific needs,” said Nautical Commerce co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ryan Lee (pictured, center, with co-founders Bhavin Shah and Niklas Halusa). “Our multivendor platform is built to power all the stakeholders that a modern commerce company has to deal with including vendors, sellers, drop-shippers, affiliates, channels, influencers and more.”

Nautical Commerce provides features that enable sellers to log into an e-commerce marketplace and manage their product inventories on a self-service basis. The platform likewise eases transaction processing, according to the startup. If a shopper buys products from multiple sellers at once, Nautical Commerce can alert each seller and help with order processing.

The company also provides features for managing the core day-to-day tasks involved in running an online store. The platform integrates with popular payment processing systems, offers a tool for managing shoppers’ accounts and enables retailers to offer discounts. A retailer can consult a set of built-in analytics dashboards to track key business metrics about its marketplace.

The platform can be used to build e-commerce marketplaces focused on both consumers and businesses. On occasion of its funding round, the startup detailed today that it has “experienced significant growth” over the past six months, but didn’t disclose absolute numbers.

The funding round will help Nautical Commerce continue its growth. The startup plans to build new features for its platform and establish a presence in more markets while growing its product development, sales, marketing and customer success teams. It expects to hire 40 additional employees over the next 18 months as part of the effort. 

Photo: Nautical Commerce