Headquartered in Paris and Boston, e-commerce company Mirakl takes a similar service to Amazon’s marketplace and offers it to major companies. Mirakl clients can partner with hundreds of third-party sellers through their platform, and the company’s clients include Urban Outfitters, Best Buy, J. Crew, and Walmart.
“What Amazon is doing is not rocket science,” Adrien Nussenbaum, CEO of Mirakl told Forbes in 2019. “I think Amazon has been able to take a fresher look at retail and the consumer experience, and that has freed them from some of the blockers that incumbent retailers have.”
As e-commerce companies find ways to transform during the COVID-19 pandemic, relying on third party-sellers to boost their offerings is a lucrative option. These marketplaces let companies sell products from many sellers to their large customer base. Mirakl provides the technology and the partner ecosystem to launch an ecommerce marketplace. Nussenbaum added that the company partners with Shopify and Adobe’s Magento Commerce on connecting their platforms to third-party sellers.
Overall, Mirakl-powered marketplaces have generated $1.2 billion in gross merchandise volume during the first half of 2020. This represents a 111% year-over-year increase, despite the economic crisis.
As a competitor to Amazon, investors are certainly interested in the company. The company just announced a $300 million funding round, bringing its valuation to $1.5 billion. Permira led the round, with existing investors 83North, Bain Capital Ventures, Elaia Partners, and Felix Capital also participating. In February 2019, the company raised $70 million and in 2018, the startup managed to add 60 customers and launch 37 marketplaces, doubling the gross merchandise volume compared to 2017.
Today, the newly minted unicorn works with 300 companies, as it begins to target B2B clients as well. With this new injection of funds, Mirakl plans to expand across all areas and boost its resources. It also looks to hire 500 engineers and scale its sales and customer success teams.
Additionally, an initial public offering is one of “the very serious options on this table and one of the drivers of this round,” Nussenbaum, stated in an interview. “We think within a couple years we would be in a position to IPO,” he said.
