Oro, an open-source e-commerce platform co-founded by Magento’s co-founder and former CTO, announced a $13 million strategic growth funding round today.
The round was led by Zubr Capital with participation from existing investor Highland Europe.
Oro, based in Los Angeles, was founded in 2012 and offers a variety of applications, including OroCommerce, its flagship B2B e-commerce platform for building storefronts and marketplaces; OroMarketplace, an end-to-end management platform designed specifically for marketplace businesses; OroCRM, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform; and OroPlatform, a rapid development platform for web apps.
While similar players in this space, such as Shopify and Magento, focus on B2C brands, Oro’s e-commerce infrastructure directly targets B2B companies such as manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and wholesalers. This is more complicated than it appears, according to Yoav Kutner, CEO and co-founder of Oro.
“B2B e-commerce has very different dynamics than B2C commerce — instead of high-volume transactional purchases with a rotating group of consumers, B2B brands are focusing on high-value deals with a smaller group of loyal customers,” Kutner told TechCrunch. “As such, B2B digital commerce solutions must be able to meet the complex needs of business buyers with large orders, split shipments, customized offerings and many other features, while supporting comprehensive ongoing customer engagement and personalized offerings.”
B2B buyers are now expecting the same level of usability that they have come to expect from B2C platforms that they may also use in their daily lives, which means B2B merchants must change the game.
Kutner founded Oro with co-founders Jary Carter and Dima Soroka just over a decade ago, shortly after leaving Magento, which he sold to eBay for around $180 million the year before. In 2018, Adobe paid $1.68 billion for Magento and renamed it Adobe Commerce.
Oro is similar to Magento in a number of ways, perhaps most notably its open-source foundations, which provide greater flexibility in areas such as hosting and deployment, while also allowing businesses to tweak and customize things to their specific needs.
Oro previously raised $12 million in 2016, and with another $13 million in the bank, Kutner said the company plans to “shake up the digital commerce industry for years to come.”
