E-commerce had a moment during the global pandemic, but not only have things cooled since then, but it has become downright competitive as the economy cooled last year, according to Jordan Gal, co-founder and CEO of Meeting.
“Founders in this space used to talk about optimism, but that has become realism and people are more careful,” Gal told TechCrunch. “The pie seems to have stopped growing and there is fiercer competition for what is left on that pie.”
Gal went on to explain that traders have to make tougher decisions, even if they can afford to invest in software.
That’s why Rally, a composable payment platform for e-commerce merchants, has divided its business into two segments: the first to meet merchants where they are with integrations to commerce tools, such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Magento, and BigCommerce; the second to offer traders a “headless” ecosystem.
The term “headless” refers to the ability to change the front-end or back-end of one website without affecting the other. Gal said he couldn’t provide details yet, but said Rally is close to announcing a partnership with specialist front-end and back-end companies to offer headless-as-a-service.
Gal started Rally with Rok Knez to build payment tools for merchants outside of the Shopify ecosystem. Both were previously involved with another payment company, CartHook, and led the company to process nearly $3 billion in transactions for Shopify merchants before selling to Pantastic in 2021, Gal said.
Currently working with 50 e-commerce merchants, Rally provides one-click checkout with payment processing and post-purchase offer tools that turns shopping into a multi-revenue channel by allowing the merchant to inject offers after payment . For example, instead of going directly to a “thank you” page, consumers would be offered the option to upgrade to a subscription or purchase additional similar products in a way that doesn’t interrupt the checkout flow.
The implementation of the post-purchase offer has helped merchants increase revenue by more than 12% on average, Gal said.
Meanwhile, over the past 12 months, Rally has doubled the size of its team and is “making millions in GMV (gross merchandise volume) monthly,” Gal said.
TechCrunch previously profiled the company when raised $6 million in seed funding. Today, the company announced additional funding of $12 million in Series A financing. It was led by March Capital, joined by Felix Capital, Commerce Ventures, Afore Capital, Alumni Ventures and Kraken Ventures. The new investment, which closed in the first quarter of 2023, provides Rally with $18 million in total venture capital.
Gal plans to focus the new funding on merchandising, including entering new markets, such as enterprise and international, and expanding integrations beyond Swell, BigCommerce and others, including Salesforce Commerce Cloud, commercetools, Affirm and AfterPay. Rally will also focus on strengthening its fraud protection offering and developing web3 features, starting with allowing merchants to accept cryptocurrency in their payments.
“We want to establish a reputation as the best option when a merchant is looking to upgrade their checkout or create a new site without having to create their own checkout,” Gal said. “You can’t just build it and leave it alone, so merchants look for a partner they can trust so they can focus on what they do best.”
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