Webscale recently announced the closing of $26 million in growth capital financing from investors and Silicon Valley Bank. The Series C round was led by BGV, STCAP Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures, with participation from Grotech Ventures and Neythri Futures Fund. This financing will be used to accelerate the adoption of the Webscale Platform for ecommerce merchants of all sizes, in addition to growing our R&D, DevSecOps, marketing, sales, customer success and support functions within the business. We also plan to expand into new markets where we have seen strong demand, with our customer base now spanning 12 countries. Growing our presence in these regions will allow us to better serve customers, partners, and the Webscale community around the globe. Hundreds of new storefronts joined the Webscale platform in 2020 and 2021, including brands like Adidas, Agri Beef, Dollar General, Watsco, Wahl, Outdoor Research, Hardinge and more.
“Outdoor Research’s cloud deployment of our re-platformed website with Webscale was seamless. The scalability of the platform, the level of visibility it provides, combined with the expertise of their team, gives us the foundation we need to deliver for our customers,” said Norin Crawford, VP Direct Sales at Outdoor Research.
Cloud, Security, the EDGE and Headless Commerce
The COVID pandemic pushed ecommerce from 14% of all US retail sales to north of 30% in 2020. Ecommerce sales in 2021 are likely to settle at approximately 27% of retail according to analysts. Our market size doubled in these difficult months, where consumers were forced online with changed buying behaviors that are here to stay. With this rapid growth came an increased need from merchants, vendors and agencies, to be more agile and deliver sites faster than ever before.
Until now, the majority of ecommerce platforms were built to deliver consistent user experiences across a fairly limited number of devices, mostly desktop or laptop computers, and some mobile (smartphones, tablets). Increasingly however, ecommerce market leaders are focusing on enriching user experiences across a much wider variety of buyer endpoints such as voice-enabled shopping assistants, smartwatches, mall kiosks, smart TVs, and more.
Delivering a consistent user experience across such a wide spectrum of platforms is challenging, but a collection of new technologies and architectures known as “Headless Ecommerce” is making it simpler. And it is a win for all involved. The merchants benefit from agility, technology vendors benefit from the ability to deliver the right solution for each requirement, and agencies benefit from the ability to work with merchants on any platform front end, without concerning themselves with complex backend modifications every time a change is made.
Headless adoption brings with it the need to evolve infrastructure to ensure the same or better performance, availability and security needs. Webscale is at the leading edge when it comes to the delivery of consistent user experiences across varying shopping carts and headless frontends, including Magento PWA Studio, Vue Storefront, Node.js and many others. Integrating CI/CD best practices with enhancements such as Site Splice, and services that include Cloud Application Testing, Cloud Image Manager and Cloud Bot Manager has been a key part of our merchants’ success.
Beyond this, the opportunity to present performance optimization and security solutions at the origin, as well as the edge, is available through Webscale’s newest products including CloudEDGE Security for all hosted ecommerce platforms, CloudEDGE CDN for all merchants with end customers transacting online, and CloudEDGE Headless for seamless delivery of any site.
A one stop shop for all ecommerce cloud infrastructure and software needs
We are continuing to see strong demand for our fully managed cloud plans built for various sizes of customer in B2B, B2C and B2E segments. Once onboarded with Webscale, our customers have immediate access to our entire software stack, as well as a global 24/7 support team to help them when they need it.
In addition, we’re seeing some merchants looking to build smaller DevSecOps platforms internally, and augment them with the functionality of the Webscale Control Platform. The same tools our support team uses to provide automated workflows to maintain 100% uptime, robust security and high performance, are available to our customers’ teams as well, all through a single pane of glass.
Thank you to all Webscale Customers and Partners
We continue to add Fortune 1000 and mid-market customers, going well beyond fashion-beauty-retail-ecommerce, extending into B2B, fintech, pharmaceutical, sporting goods, health-tech, and e-learning verticals where there is a clear need for our services. You can check out some of our most recent success stories here to learn why Webscale has risen to become one of the most trusted brands for ecommerce storefronts and any business conducting online transactions.
Global expansion of R&D and sales operations
If we had to call out one thing that has helped us grow and succeed as we have over the past 5+ years, it would be our focus on the voice of our customers, We work hard to understand their pain points and to build solutions that solve their unique challenges. We have begun to aggressively expand our engineering, DevSecOps, and Site Reliability teams in Bangalore, India and Boulder, Colorado, along with sales, customer success and support teams in those offices, as well as San Antonio, TX, Santa Clara, CA, and London, UK, to better serve our customers and digital agency partners worldwide. These stakeholders are the key to our combined future success and we continue to focus on their needs.
And we are hiring!
To support our global expansion efforts, we are hiring across a variety of departments and locations, and plan to double our headcount in the next year. If you’re interested in joining us on our ambitious mission, please check out our job openings on our website as well as our LinkedIn page to learn more about our culture, and spread the word with amazing people who would be great additions to the team.
