SoftBank leads $140 million investment in Brazilian tech startup VTEX

VTEX, a multi-tenant cloud commerce provider platform that unifies customer experiences across all channels into a comprehensive enterprise solution, has closed a $140 million investment round from SoftBank’s Latin America fund in conjunction with Gávea Investimentos and Constellation Asset Management. According to VTEX, the new capital will be used to support its continued global expansion and advancements to its cloud commerce offerings.

Founded in 1999 by Geraldo Thomaz and Mariano Gomide, the São Paulo, Brazil-based VTEX is a provider of SaaS with an auto-scaling elastic cloud infrastructure for higher conversion rates. The startup helps brands accelerate their unified commerce transformation. With an auto-scaling cloud infrastructure and a powerful set of tools, the platform accelerates the commerce transformation of complex operations.

VTEX is used by some of the world’s largest companies including Sony, Walmart, Whirlpool, Coca-Cola, Stanley Black & Decker, Nestlé and over 2,500 online stores in 28 countries. In 2018, the company was also named a major player on IDC MarketScape Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled B2C Digital Commerce Platforms and ranked in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce.

“For the past four years, we’ve focused on building a platform that enables global commerce by unifying our clients’ operations online and offline,” said Mariano Gomide, co-founder and co-CEO of VTEX. “During that time, we’ve opened US and EU offices and strengthened our position in Latin America. This investment from SoftBank and its partners validates our dedication to delivering a scalable, secure, global unified commerce platform.”

With a compounding organic growth of 43% per year in the last five years, VTEX has become one of the largest global players in the Digital Commerce market. Headquartered in London, the company has been recognized by IDC and Gartner as a player to watch, based on the user experience VTEX delivers, its ease of configuration, and its rapid time-to-implement.

In the beginning of 2019, VTEX purchased UniteU, an e-commerce platform based in the US. “Acquiring UniteU was only the first step of a responsible and consistent expansion of VTEX in the US. We have big plans to accelerate our continued global growth and product innovation,” said Gomide.

VTEX provides commerce solutions to 2,500 global brands, including Levi’s, Sony, Walmart, L’Oréal and Motorola. The company’s innovations include a patent-pending passwordless checkout called SmartCheckout™, an architectural network of microservices to seamlessly deliver continuous updates, and the company’s VTEX IO serverless development framework that enables clients to develop scalable, production-ready web applications for global commerce without infrastructure complexity.

“Becoming the global power in unified commerce platforms for medium and large companies is our goal,” said Geraldo Thomaz, VTEX’s other co-founder and co-CEO. “With this investment, we will be able to invest more in R&D, respond to market demands faster, and deliver a more robust product that leverages AI to take us into the future of commerce.”

“VTEX has three attributes that we believe will fuel the company’s success: a strong team culture, a best-in-class product and entrepreneurs with a profitability mindset,” said Paulo Passoni, managing investment partner at SoftBank’s Latin America fund. “Brands and retailers want reliability and the ability to test their own innovations. VTEX offers both, filling a gap in the market. With VTEX, companies get access to a proven, cloud-native platform with the flexibility to test add-ons in the same data layer.”