Traders who build companies on massive marketplaces often have to think within the framework of the market, but Jellyfisha one-year-old ecommerce startup from Denmark, goes after ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce, with its open source alternative aimed at the JavaScript developer community.
Co-founders Sebastian Rindom, Oliver Juhl and Nicklas Gellner started the company a year ago, although they have been working on the software for four years with a first customer. What they found, by helping that customer scale their business through the Shopify and WooCommerce marketplaces, was that they had to do a little more coding and hacks than they thought should be done.
“You are limited in building software so that customers can see scale,” Rindom told businesskinda.com. “The client was optimistic about e-commerce and wanted to double their sales in a year, so we figured out what platform they could migrate to to make that happen, and Medusa was the result.”
The company’s technology essentially consists of APIs that provide a “headless” offering – meaning the front-end technology is separated from the back-end technology, allowing adjustments and maintenance to be made in one section without the other. to disrupt – for merchants who want more control over their ecommerce tech stack.
Rather than forcing your way through, users can take advantage of standard implementations that Rindom believes are equivalent to Shopify features, including APIs that connect to various tools, including payment providers, logistics tools, and customer management systems. When users outgrow that, they can plug into a third-party tool or create their own.
Rindom explained that today’s marketplaces offer certain basic APIs to integrate with, but if you want to experiment with fulfillment, subscriptions, or a wholesale channel, you’ll need access outside of that standard API. Instead, Medusa offers a more modular architecture that allows users to do anything.
It’s clear that even Shopify sees the need for more features so that its users can get up and running quickly. The future of the digital trading software market will be driven by the growth of the e-commerce market itself, which will be a trillion dollar market within ten years.
We’ve also seen venture capital investment in the regions pick up, with companies like Fabric, Shopware, CommerceIQ and Swell receiving funding for headless commerce approaches and infrastructure in the past six months. Other startups, such as Shop Circle, are also developing software for Shopify merchants to do more in the marketplace.
Medusa itself is among that group that has raised $8 million in seed funding in a round co-led by LocalGlobe and Dawn Capital, with the participation of a group of individual investors including Squarespace founder and CEO Anthony Casalena, Algolia founder Nicolas Dessaigne and former GitLab. director Scott Williamson. Combined with a pre-seed round from Seedcamp last year, the company has raised nearly $9 million in total funding.
Much of the technology in this space, including Shopify, is more than a decade old, making Medusa an attractive investment, Dawn partner Mina Mutafchieva said in a written statement.
“As a result, the pain points for e-commerce merchants are exploding and most, if not all, we’ve spoken with at Dawn over the past two years are using inefficient ‘work-arounds’ to achieve their business goals,” Mutafchieva added. up. . “Balancing the right level of an easy-to-use API-first approach with a great deal of customizability, Medusa’s product is a dream come true for developers and vendors who need to customize their platforms while maintaining maximum performance and response times.”
Already active in e-commerce stores, Medusa sells more than $100 million a year, and in less than a year has amassed a community of more than 2,000 developers who have launched some 10,000 projects on the platform.
Rindom didn’t disclose sales figures, in part because it doesn’t make any money at the moment. It’s something that’s being planned, he said, but the company is currently more focused on validating its technology and driving adoption.
That focus is where the funding will ultimately be deployed, including building products and small APIs, creating content around those APIs, and setting up material on how to use them. Medusa wants to hire additional developers and engineers and invest more in community efforts and partnerships.
Future plans include building a cloud tool for the product that will allow users to connect their GitHub repository to Medusa’s infrastructure to manage the tools. That’s something the company will charge for, but “is still a little ahead for the future,” Rindom said.
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