Staytuned raises $34 million in equity and debt to build ‘Salesforce suite for e-commerce’

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By Webdesk


Staytuned Digital has $34 million in new equity and debt to continue developing a software suite for ecommerce brands aiming at what co-founder Serge Kassardjian described as “the Salesforce suite for ecommerce stores.”

“Ecommerce has completely shifted and moved into these emerging platforms, Shopify being the largest,” he said. “In turn, we buy and build software around the Shopify ecosystem.”

The software company focuses on Shopify merchants and acquires and builds e-commerce applications. It has acquired seven apps to date and is working with more than 28,000 customers, Kassardjian told TechCrunch.

While Kassardjian declined to disclose sales growth, he did say the company was EBITDA positive in the fourth quarter.

The new investment includes $9 million in equity and $25 million in debt, with the option to take up to $25 million more, Kassardjian said. To date, the company has raised $46.5 million in a combination of equity and debt.

Investors in the new round include TenOneTen, Rembrandt VC, Hawke Ventures, DragonX, FJ Labs, Interlace, Riverpark Ventures, Comma Capital, Kotti Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, Jason Finger and a group of angel investors. Tacora Capital led the debt financing.

TechCrunch profiled Staytuned in 2019 when the company focused on video. Kassardjian said 11 months after starting the company, he and co-founder Randy Jimenez realized the product wasn’t working and was doing “a hard pivot.”

“We went to our board and told them we burned very little capital, say half a million,” said Kassardjian. “All of our investors were like ‘we invested in you and we believe in you.’ So we went back to the drawing board and this was a successful pivot, we also brought in a whole new group of investors and each valuation has been higher and higher.

Lauralynn Drury has since joined the founding team to help build the products and scale the strategy.

The new funding will allow Staytuned to acquire more apps — Kassardjian said there’s a long pipeline of potential apps to acquire — to hire additional engineers and scale faster.

“Software is super high margin and growing faster than Shopify, while Shopify is growing faster than the e-commerce ecosystem,” said Kassardjian. “So if we buy and build enough software, we can have the largest hub of brands and merchants using the software, which will drive e-commerce in the future.”



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