News - Mirakl receives $300m investment from private equity

M Ryan M Ryan

September 22nd, 2020. Mirakl, the ecommerce marketplace software solution provider,  announced they have received an outside investment of $300m from new investor Permira as well its existing private equity owners. The investment has valued the marketplace provider at $1.5bn. Permira is also an investor in Genesys, the French customer services software provider, Klarna, the Swedish deferred payments provider and Pepperjam, the US affiliate marketing platform.

The investment will be used to expand Mirakl's engineering team by 300 to further develop its APIs, create new integrations with other businesses and software platforms, build new AI capabilities and to extend its nascent B2B marketplace features. The scale of this increase in team size highlights just how labor-intensive enterprise software development is.

Mirakl claims 11 of the top 40 largest North American retailers as its customers, with another 25 customers added during the first half of 2020, during which time its software facilitated over transactions over $1bn in merchandise value. Customers include French grocery giant Carrefour, German retailer Metro, US grocery giant Kroger, and Best Buy Canada.

Comment

Mirakl is one of only a few providers that offers a complete solution to businesses looking to operate a marketplace. Running a marketplace is a different proposition to operating a B2B or B2C ecommerce operation. It is only viable for companies that have a lot of presence / traffic for a specific audience and can leverage that to sell other companies' products and services without taking on the stock risk (and enhanced margin potential) associated with the retail business model.

This article was updated on March 2, 2021

M Ryan

M Ryan is an ecommerce consultant with twenty years experience working with retailers, consumer brand manufacturers and other consumer-facing businesses helping them to develop their ecommerce strategy, implement ecommerce technology and improve their ecommerce operations. He works extensively throughout US and Europe, with clients including global brands, large retailers and household names in consumer goods.

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