Oro, the open source e-commerce platform co-created by the co-founder and former CTO of Magento, today announced it has raised $13 million in a strategic growth round of funding.
Founded in 2012, Los Angeles-based Oro’s platform comprises a variety of applications, including OroCommerce, the flagship B2B e-commerce platform for building stores and marketplaces. OroMarketplace is an end-to-end management platform dedicated to marketplace businesses. A customer relationship management platform (CRM) called OroCRM. And OroPlatform, a rapid web app development platform.
While similar players in this space, such as Shopify and Magento, focus primarily (albeit not exclusively) on B2C brands, Oro goes straight to B2B companies such as manufacturers, suppliers, distributors and wholesalers. Targeting from According to Oro CEO and co-founder Yoav Kutner, this is more complicated to execute than his B2C.
“B2B e-commerce has very different dynamics than B2C commerce. Instead of high-volume transactional purchases with a rotating cast of consumers, B2B brands focus on high-value transactions with a small group of loyal customers. “That’s why B2B digital commerce solutions can meet the complex needs of business buyers with bulk orders, split shipments, customized quotes, and many other features,” Kutner told TechCrunch. It needs to support rich ongoing customer engagement and personalized products.”
Oro platform example image credit: oro
But on top of that, B2B buyers expect the kind of ease of use they’re used to from any B2C platform they might use elsewhere in their daily lives. In short, B2B merchants had to step up their game.
“One of our key challenges is to provide robust, feature-rich, enterprise-grade selling tools, while also providing a consumer-facing shopping experience with smart, streamlined discovery, buying and tracking options.” added Kutner.
Things get even more complicated when you consider that a single seller may have completely different and different markets for their goods. Kutner gave the example of a glassware manufacturer. For example, you may need to introduce separate sales portals for the medical and catering departments. This may also require sellers to set up different pricing structures for each vertical, with Oro automatically calculating new prices or discounts based on preset rules and business logic defined by the seller. enables this through a so-called “dynamic pricing engine”.
“Coordinating these operations behind the scenes is a particular challenge for B2B companies and e-commerce providers,” says Kutner.
Up to this point
Oro’s leadership team: From left to right is CEO Yoav Kutner. Laurent Desprez, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Europe. Dima Soroka, CTO. image credit: oro
Kutner launched Oro just over a decade ago with two co-founders, Jary Carter and Dima Soroka, shortly after leaving Magento, which he sold to eBay last year for around $180 million. In 2018, Adobe acquired Magento for his $1.68 billion and rebranded it to Adobe Commerce.
Oro is in some ways a similar proposition to Magento. Perhaps chief among them is an open-source foundation that provides greater flexibility in things like hosting and deployment, allowing businesses to tweak and adapt to their unique use cases.
This means businesses can host Oro on their own infrastructure as needed, or deploy it on-premises or in any combination of public and private clouds.
“Users can also easily and quickly switch between deployment models. For example, if an on-premises customer needs to scale up quickly to accommodate a surge in web traffic and leverage private or public cloud infrastructure. And so on,” Kutner said. “Our hybrid approach also puts our customers in control of their data. We make it possible, there are no restrictions on how you can do it, our customers can take advantage of our hosting options according to their needs.”
So far, Oro has raised $12 million in 2016, and with another $13 million in bank, Kutner said the company has plans to “disrupt the digital commerce industry for years to come.” said standing up.
Oro’s latest capital injection was led by Zubr Capital, with participation from existing investor Highland Europe.
