SAN FRANCISCO — Swell Commerce, which bills itself as a headless commerce platform serving fast growing businesses, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round led by VMG Catalyst and Headline.
The global company, which aims to put an end to merchant replatforming, will use the funds to accelerate adoption and to develop an ecosystem of apps, themes, integrations and merchant solutions. Swell plans to hire across key areas, including product, engineering, design, support, sales and marketing.
Swell’s mission is to build an ecommerce platform using headless architecture “that everyone can use.”
Swell’s native features, such as subscription management and localization, enable sophisticated use cases without requiring custom development. For merchants seeking more control, the platform’s API-first architecture and customizable data models enable powerful capabilities.
“This investment is validation for us and confirms that the market sees our vision and is excited about our customers’ stories,” says Swell co-founder and CEO, Eric Ingram. “We are building for the future of commerce, and this funding round will allow us to scale our remote-first team so that we can better serve the needs of leading brands and ecommerce merchants.”
The funding round includes participation from previous investors Bonfire Ventures and Willow Growth, and from first-time Swell investor Commerce Ventures. Other notable investors in the Series A round include Brian Long (CEO of Attentive), Romain Lapeyre (CEO of Gorgias) and Andreas Klinger (Remote First Capital and former CTO of Product Hunt). Carle Stenmark, partner at VMG Catalyst, will join the Board of Directors.
In conjunction with the Series A funding, Swell announced the hiring of Kevin McKeand as Chief Commercial Officer. McKeand has more than a decade of experience leading high performing teams across sales, business development and partnerships, including at BigCommerce where he led a team managing over 800 partnerships with companies such as Google, Amazon, PayPal, Stripe, ShipStation and many others. Most recently, he led the business development and partnership teams at Zip, a global buy now, pay later provider.