VentureBeat: Amplience Raises $100M to Grow MACH Ecommerce Platform
Amplience, which makes a next-gen commerce experience platform for business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) clients, announced yesterday that it has raised $100 million in series D funding.Amplience’s cloud-based platform is developer-powered, business-enabled and built on a MACH architecture that delivers a force multiplier in terms of speed, agility and scalability for creating digital experiences, the company said.
The platform architecture emanates from the cooperative MACH Alliance, which presents and advocates for an open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystem. The ecosystem technology is microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native software-as-a-service (SaaS) and headless, thus the MACH acronym. It uses individual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed and managed. Much of the componentry is open source.
What the MACH ecosystem is all about
MACH subscribers believe that enterprise suites of software are no longer the best choice to run ecommerce apps. They contend that the MACH ecosystem is agile, nimble and always up to date, while legacy proprietary systems are out of sync with the requirements of 2022 workloads.
“There is a growing performance chasm between digital leaders who have invested heavily to build their own customer-centric commerce experience infrastructure, and companies still relying on legacy content management and ecommerce systems,” Amplience Founder, James Brooke said in a media advisory. “Amplience helps its customers to bridge this gap and accelerate their implementation of a modern commerce experience, through using best-of-breed MACH and composable capabilities without sacrificing either business usability or developer productivity.”
As an executive member of the MACH Alliance, Brooke said, the company is “passionate about supporting our customers to make the transition to a Microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native and headless (MACH) commerce experience architecture. To that end, we are doubling-down on product investment, and in scaling our global go-to-market, customer success and expert services teams.”
Amplience, founded in 2008, competes in the ecommerce platform market against Adobe Systems, Contentstack, Bloomreach, Contentful and Progress SiteInfinity, according to Gartner Peer Insights. The platform received a four-out-of-five-star rating from professionals who reviewed it.
Digital experience is a key to success with customers
“When it comes to digital experience, there is a direct correlation between employee satisfaction and great customer outcomes,” said Marci Maddox, research director for IDC’s Digital Experience Management Software program. “Our research tells us that 85% of organizations believe that empowering employees leads to greater customer satisfaction; however, only 40% of surveyed companies have taken action. It is essential that organizations who aspire to be digital leaders adopt technology and tools that empower developers and business users. It is the route to revolutionizing customer experiences and boosting brand loyalty.”
Brooke said that more than 400 of the world’s leading brands use Amplience, including Crate & Barrel, Traeger Grills, Ulta Beauty, Coach, GAP, Currys, Argos and Very Group. Amplience has 200 global employees and has raised a total of $180 million from investors.Amplience received its recent series D funding with an equity investment from Farview Equity Partners, a European growth equity investor, and growth financing from Sixth Street, a global investment firm. Existing investor Octopus Ventures also contributed.
Author: Chris J. Preimesberger