Businesses can use dozens of separate software tools to manage their day-to-day operations. Carbon6 Technologies estimates that for smaller businesses, like e-commerce marketplace companies, that can be between eight and 15 custom SaaS tools, which can cost anywhere from several thousand dollars to tens of thousands per year.
Instead of continuing to buy each business, inventory and advertising management tool separately, Carbon6 Technologies’ co-founders Justin Cobb, Kazi Ahmed and Naseem Saloojee believe all of them should live under one umbrella.
Their Toronto-based company is in the business of acquiring those types of software for use by e-commerce merchants selling on the Amazon marketplace, and just got a big boost from $66 million in Series A funding to simplify the online selling process for its customers.
The new investment is a mix of equity, led by White Star Capital, and debt funding from MidCap Financial. The company declined to provide the breakdown of equity and debt. Joining those investors in the round are Kale Investment Fund and Benevolent Capital.
Since founding the company in 2021, Carbon6 has acquired 16 software companies. It has over 200,000 active users, and “based on cross-sell metrics and paid customer conversion with our other tools, more than 50% of the customers of many of our tools are paying for our products,” the company said. It also acquired a large number of free customers with one of its recent acquisitions.
While there are other companies out there also bundling SaaS tools, for example Beamy and Paragon, Carbon6 says what sets it apart from other all-in-one offerings is that while competitors are targeting smaller sellers, it is building a model to support larger and growing sellers in the early stages of the product life cycle, but also as they grow, scale and optimize their businesses.
“It’s really 200,000 professional sellers that drive the market,” Saloojee told TechCrunch. “We saw a unique opportunity to buy and build a series of tools that serve them.”
The company intends to deploy the new funds into international expansion by opening offices in Europe and Asia. The founders also want to cater to marketplaces beyond Amazon and continue to grow the business through hiring and M&A. Cobb expects Carbon6 to have over 20 products under its umbrella by the first quarter of 2023.
“Building partially through acquisition, what it enables us to do is put experts around the table,” Cobb told TechCrunch. “When we looked at other businesses that were built through M&A, we decided that we would incentivize founders to stay with us. It gives us the best chance to create the innovation needed because we’re putting the most expertise around the table.”
Source @TechCrunch
