Paris and Michigan-based Commerce Guys have raised a €5.3 Million Series from Hi Inov, ISAI, Alven Capital & Open Ocean Capital. The announcement comes just weeks after the company rolled out Platform, a PaaS hosting solution that allows for seamless continuous development, focusing on seamless push-to-prod.
Commerce Guys launched in 2010, and the bulk of their work has been around providing an eCommerce solution for websites built on Drupal (a PHP framework similar to WordPress). They previously raised €3.6 Million from Alven Capital & ISAI – ISAI’s biggest investment round to date – and it is clear with this new fundraising that they are moving away from eCommerce integration towards a platform play.
One of their investors, Open Ocean Capital, is a dead giveaway. Open Ocean Capital was started by the founders of MySQL, who sold to Sun (since acquired by Oracle) for $1 Billion. They typically invest in open source technologies, looking for the next MySQL, or technologies that can provide similar leaps in development that MySQL provided to database storage.
Having had the chance to meet and talk with co-founder Fred Plais, I’ve been pretty impressed with Commerce Guys so far. While they may not have gone with the most popular framework (WordPress currently makes up 20% of websites on the internet), Drupal still maintains 5.2% of marketshare of all websites in the world (that’s a lot), though this number is ever-shrinking. More interestingly, Drupal is powering 12% of the top 100,000 websites.
It’s unclear as to how Commerce Guys will integrate Platform into the workflow of companies. Platform feels like the next evolution of Heroku, or a web version of what Facebook is doing with Parse. It’ll be exciting to see if they try to position themselves as a full-stack solution for Drupal sites, or if they expand to other frameworks.