Shogun, a leading e-commerce experience platform, today announced that it has raised a $67.5 million Series C round of funding led by new investor Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Initialized Capital, Accel and VMG Partners. This brings the company’s total funding to $114.5 million.
Shogun empowers brands to create unique e-commerce experiences by making it easy to build and optimize online storefronts with two products: Page Builder, a drag-and-drop page builder for Shopify merchants, and Shogun Frontend, an end-to-end headless commerce solution. Shogun will use this latest funding to continue accelerating product development for Shogun Frontend with a mission to enable more brands to realize the benefits of headless commerce. In addition, the funding will be used to rapidly scale go-to-market efforts across sales and marketing to meet growing demand.
Trusted by over 18,000 customers including K-Swiss, Leesa, Rumpl, BeardBrand, MVMT and Fila, Shogun recently launched headless commerce storefronts for brands including Groove Life, OneBlade, Nomad, The Feed and Undersun Fitness using Shogun Frontend.
“We’re continuing to see tremendous interest in headless commerce. In 2020, 61% of online retailers said they are leveraging it or intend to leverage it, and that number is rising,” said Finbarr Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Shogun. “Great shopping experiences define great brands, and having access to packaged headless commerce software is crucial. Historically, headless has been restricted to brands with the biggest budgets, or has been considered developer-centric, but we’re on a mission to democratize headless, empowering any brand to deliver exceptional experiences easily.”
In a two-year period, gross merchandise value (GMV) generated by brands through the Shogun platform increased by 255%. Company headcount has grown 90% in the past six months to 160 team members, and the company plans to make significant hires this year across its global remote workforce. In particular, Shogun has introduced several key executives in recent months, including:
- Kristen Habacht, chief sales officer
- Former global head of EDR sales at Atlassian
- Tapan Bhatt, chief marketing officer
- Former vice president of marketing at Splunk and PagerDuty
- Steve Won, VP of product
- Former head of authentication products at Duo Security
- Mattie Isaac, VP of people
- Former senior vice president of human resources at EatStreet
“Our investment in Shogun underscores the market’s desire to see headless commerce become merchant-focused,” said Matt Gatto, managing director at Insight Ventures. “More brands want to be able to build headless progressive web apps in a low-code environment. Those on the forefront of e-commerce want to enable web teams to build truly unique, memorable shopping experiences. Shogun is well positioned to make flexible frontends accessible to brands in a whole new way, and we’re excited to be a partner in this journey.”
“Our traditional e-commerce platform was limiting our growth, so we made the decision to take our existing Shopify store headless with Shogun Frontend, and it’s been a game changer,” says Josh Nash, CMO at OneBlade. “After implementing Shogun Frontend, the results were dramatic — we saw a 579% increase in active product refill subscriptions, a 30.1% increase in average order value year over year, and an 83% decrease in page-to-page load time. No other changes we’ve made to our business have even come close to that kind of an impact in such a short period of time.”
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