In a strategic growth round of funding, Oro, an open source e-commerce platform co-founded by the former CTO and cofounder of Magento, raised $13 million, the company revealed today.
Oro, a Los Angeles-based company, was founded in 2012. Its platform consists of a number of applications, including OroCommerce, its flagship B2B ecommerce platform for creating storefronts and marketplaces; OroMarketplace, an end-to-end management platform specifically for marketplace businesses; OroCRM, a platform for managing customer relationships; and OroPlatform, a platform for quickly developing web apps.
Oro targets its ecommerce infrastructure directly at B2B companies including manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and wholesalers, in contrast to similar players in the market like Shopify and Magento that primarily (though not entirely) focus on B2C brands. Yoav Kutner, the CEO and cofounder of Oro, claims that this will be more difficult to implement than B2C.
B2B merchants have had to step up their game since B2B shoppers now demand the same level of usefulness they have grown accustomed to with B2C platforms they may use elsewhere in their daily life.
When you take into account the possibility that one vendor may have completely diverse and distinct marketplaces for their goods, things become much more complicated. A glassware producer, for instance, could need to launch different sales webpages aimed at the catering and medical industries, according to Kutner’s example. This may also necessitate that the seller establish distinct pricing structures for each vertical, which Oro makes possible with the aid of a so-called “dynamic pricing engine” that instantly determines new prices or discounts in accordance with pre-established rules and business logic specified by the seller.
Just a few years after leaving Magento, which he had sold to eBay the year before for almost $180 million, Kutner founded Oro with two cofounders, Jary Carter and Dima Soroka. In the end, Adobe acquired Magento in 2018 for $1.68 billion and renamed it Adobe Commerce.
Oro is a similar offering to Magento in a number of aspects, perhaps most notably in that it is built on open source principles, giving it more control over issues like hosting and deployment while also enabling businesses to customise and adapt it to their own use-cases. As a result, businesses have the option of hosting Oro on their own infrastructure or deploying it across any mix of on-premises, public, and private clouds.
Oro had previously raised $12 million in 2016, and with an additional $13 million on hand, according to Kutner, the company intends to “shake up the digital commerce market for many years to come.” Zubr Capital headed the most recent infusion of funds into Oro, and Highland Europe, an existing investor, also contributed.
