Why I invested in Moltin’s seed round
Last week, Moltin’s Series A was announced.
The company provides API-first e-commerce infrastructure — enabling online retailers to benefit fully from the serverless revolution — achieving dramatic increases in agility, flexibility, and — most importantly — customer experience. What Twillio did for SMS, what Stripe did for payments, what Contentful did for CMS — Moltin does for the e-commerce stack.
The company provides API-first e-commerce infrastructure — enabling online retailers to benefit fully from the serverless revolution — achieving dramatic increases in agility, flexibility, and — most importantly — customer experience. What Twillio did for SMS, what Stripe did for payments, what Contentful did for CMS — Moltin does for the e-commerce stack.
The company has come a long way since I first took the train up to Newcastle to get to know this intriguing company I had read about in a developer newsletter. Like any early-stage deep tech company, Moltin’s journey to a Series A was not always smooth — but they have successfully navigated that chasm and are now poised to reach new heights.
Since my first investment in the company, a number of other investors have joined the journey. I’m thrilled that Frontline Ventures, Connect Ventures, and — most recently — Underscore, a Boston-based VC firm led by Michael Skok, have decided to support the company. Underscore’s investment is particularly significant given Michael’s role as an early backer of Demandware (acq. by Salesforce for $2.8B). Michael knows a thing or two about e-commerce infrastructure. Most transformationally, the company was able to recruit Jamus Driscoll to join as CEO. Jamus previously held a number of very senior management roles at Demandware, including SVP Marketing, SVP EMEA, and SVP Operations. The company is now HQed in Boston with a development center in Newcastle. In short, Moltin is very well positioned at this point — and I can’t wait to see what’s next.
The Moltin Investment thesis
I thought this might be a good opportunity to revisit the original investment thesis. I went and dug up my original investment memo on AngelList to see how well it captured my thinking at the time and how the company has evolved since. As always, the thesis consisted of a few elements that — together — formed what I believed to be a coherent and compelling thesis, and they have held up pretty well:
- Strong forward-looking technology. Moltin is fundamentally a technology-driven investment. It’s part of a much broader trend towards APIs, microservices/containerization, rapid/continuous deployment cycles, and hyper-flexible IT architectures. Moltin is not the first company to take a significant part of the IT stack and put it behind an API — but they are on the very cutting edge of doing that for e-commerce, and they started when doing that was still pretty controversial. The benefits of this approach are significant: dramatic increases in organizational agility and design flexibility. What was radical when Moltin got underway, is now increasingly the undisputed direction in which most of the technology world is heading.
- A valuable application in a large market. As commerce moves online in a major way, all sorts of commerce-related activities and functions move online as well — and one of those is brand-building. Twenty years ago, a consumer brand was built in a physical environment (a store, a mall, a retail channel of some kind). Today, brands are being built online, and the e-commerce experience itself is a critical consumer touchpoint for brands. Opportunities to use design and UX to deliver a distinct consumer experience can be very powerful differentiators for brands competing for attention, loyalty, and dollars online. Moltin allows e-commerce vendors to completely divorce their backend (e-commerce stack) from their frontend (UX) without sacrificing performance or agility. That opens up an unlimited opportunity for brands to redesign digital commerce experiences from the ground up: web, mobile, TV, AR/VR, even in-store — Moltin can power all of it — and can do that without imposing any UX constraints. In the cutthroat world of online commerce, that’s going to be a big deal.
- Enterprise/Developer traction. The Moltin team understood from day one that they would need both enterprise traction and developer community buy-in to establish themselves as a leader. Their willingness to focus on both — simultaneously — and to relentlessly experiment, fail, adjust, experiment again has served them very well. When I invested, the company had a few hundred passionate developers on the platform. That number has grown to 17,000 today.
- A global approach. From our first meeting up in Newcastle, I was massively impressed by the Moltin team’s willingness to take a broad global approach from day one. Most founders (and nearly all VCs) talk about a “global approach” but not all of them are willing to take the painful steps required to make that happen when the rubber hits the road. Moltin did a number of things early on that set the stage for them to emerge as the global company they are today. Not all of those steps were easy or obvious — and some were controversial at the time. But (whether you start in Newcastle or New York) the pathway to global dominance is never an easy one and always requires a degree of willingness to operate outside the comfort zone. Moltin didn’t just talk the global talk — they walked the global walk. To step into their office in Newcastle was to be instantly teleported to Silicon Valley.
- Outstanding team. As you can probably tell from the above, the founding team at Moltin was a big part of the original investment decision to back the company — and it’s a big part of how they got to where they are today. In a word — the Moltin team bursts with authenticity. They came from the e-commerce world, on the developer side. They understood their target market intuitively and natively. They had a grasp of most of the issues Moltin’s users and customers would need to face, because they were exactly those people just moments before they started the company. They are mission-driven founders — passionate about the problem they are solving — and the authenticity that comes from that can not be bought. With the addition of Jamus as CEO, the team has only gotten stronger. It’s not easy to hand over the reins of your baby to a new CEO, but the Moltin team drove that process brilliantly. That was, in large part, also a function of authenticity. If you are building something for the right reasons, it’s that much easier to identify the right talent and make the right decisions for the company. And there is no doubt that Moltin with Jamus at the helm is supremely well positioned to take on this market.
Congrats to everyone at Moltin — and the warmest possible welcome to our new CEO, Jamus!
Let me finish with a quote from Jamus’ blog post on joining the company and on why he is so excited for what’s to come:
“Moltin uses an API-first approach to remove the constraints of traditional commerce. With Moltin, developers can build rich, vibrant commerce experiences, and easily embed them into any device or channel. Retailers can embed commerce in any social application, any digital display, including smart televisions. They can build beautiful commerce experiences without being confined to a template. It’s incredibly exciting technology that I believe will inspire the next wave of innovation within retail. And we can’t wait to see what you build.”
Chris, Adam, and Jamus of Moltin
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