French Ecommerce Platform Mirakl Raises $555 Million as It Looks to Expand Overseas

French ecommerce platform Mirakl raised $555 million as it looks to expand its international operations and forge further into business-to-business (b-to-b) ecommerce. The Series E round, led by Silver Lake Partners, brings its valuation to around $3.5 billion, more than double its worth when the startup raised $300 million around this time last year. The company helps ecommerce brands create and run third-party marketplaces within their sites and counts retailers like Kroger, Best Buy and Express among its clients. "It's fundamentally a recognition of the vision behind Mirakl, which is pretty unique, because it's a vision of an evolution of how business is done, moving away from having a business model where you need to own or make anything you sell to creating those marketplaces where you rely on partnership with third parties," Mirakl co-founder and CEO Adrien Nussenbaum told Adweek. Mirakl plans to use the capital to hire 350 engineers as it continues to build out artificial intelligence systems, as well as to double the size of its customer service organization and evaluate possible acquisitions. According to Nussenbaum, the round is one of the biggest ever venture investments in a French startup and is a signal of Mirakl's intention to become a giant in the ecommerce marketplace space. This Ecommerce Platform Offers Consumers What Amazon Can’t: Sustainable Convenience "As an entrepreneur, and when you start a business, you go through many phases that often come with exit opportunities, pragmatically," Nussenbaum said. "And there is a moment where the only exit is to become yourself the consolidator, the generational company that really can transform your industry. And so with this fundraising, we're really also asserting publicly our goals and intention, which is to make with Mirakl a really generational company transforming the way business is done." In addition to international expansion, Mirakl sees b-to-b ecommerce as one of its biggest growth areas and has increasingly expanded its reach in the space over the past few years with clients like Airbus Helicopters, Toyota Material Handling and L'Oreal's salon distribution arm. While ecommerce in b-to-b currently trails consumer-focused shopping, Nussenbaum said the opportunity is overall much bigger. "We've been able to show that marketplaces are not just a consumer ecommerce phenomenon," he added. "A marketplace is also a way for b-to-b companies to digitize their go-to market, to leverage their channel partners better in a digital world and to create more engagement from all their value chains around their brand." Mirakl also plans to invest further in automation and machine learning tools, which it currently uses to do things like organize seller catalogs and screen and vet third-party vendors. The company is also beefing up the network platform connecting its various marketplaces, Mirakl Connect. Third-party marketplaces have become an increasingly popular way for retailers to boost their online reach by allowing outside sellers to offer products directly through their ecommerce sites. Mirakl's Enterprise Marketplace Index found marketplaces grew by 81% in 2020, more than double the 40% growth rate of ecommerce overall.