Scaleworks is excited to announce today that we’ve acquired SearchSpring, a company that provides access to advanced searching for online retailers' websites. This acquisition is the first for Fund II, which we announced this past February.
We’ve all been to the sites of your favorite brands, be it Warby Parker for glasses, or Glossier for makeup, and we know how important search is to our buying experience.
“While Amazon dominates e-commerce in many ways, the rise of the small, direct to consumer player is a massive trend.” Lew Moorman, Scaleworks General Partner and Co-founder shared.
Using machine learning and artificial intelligence makes the experience even more satisfying, and that’s something SearchSpring excels at, leveraging the technology stack that they’ve built over the past 11+ years. For retail companies, ingesting their vast catalogues, making sense of that data and then building a quality and versatile search experience isn’t easy. SearchSpring does a lot of the heavy lifting and then provides a killer search experience for their customers.
Some of those customers include brands you know like Moen, Kate Somerville, Volcom, Wet Seal, Natori, Bikini.com, Wildfox, Lime Crime, 3x1 Jeans, Wine Enthusiast, Charles & Colvard, SaintBernard Sports, and Bethesda Game Studios.
SearchSpring Founder and CEO Gareth Dismore will be leaving the company and had this to say about its success and its future: “After 11 years of operating independently as a bootstrapped company, SearchSpring will now have the backing of a team of technology veterans that share our passion for search, merchandising and helping brands and retailers succeed online.”
Retail technology vet Peter Messana has been brought on as the company’s new CEO. He brings over 20 years of experience in the space, having spent time at Home Depot, Summit Sports/Austin Kayak and most recently COO of GroupBy.
Right: Gareth Dismore, Co-founder of SearchSpring
“When I ran Summit Sports/Austin Kayak, the only technology we outsourced was search, it is the most difficult piece of ecommerce. After learning more about SearchSpring I was very excited with the placement of the product and how it is aligned to SMB, which tend to have the most difficult time competing against the larger ecommerce companies. The potential with the product is amazing and I cannot wait to help the team drive the product and expose more customers to what we have to offer.” Messana said.
With e-commerce sales projected to skyrocket to $5B worldwide by 2021, search will be a massive driver of that growth. Scaleworks is excited to be a part of that.
Retail e-commerce sales worldwide from 2014 to 2021 (in billion U.S. dollars) (via Statista)
On the acquisition, Moorman added: “It really hits all the key things we look for. Great tech with opportunity to enhance the go to market approach. It’s a great size and there is opportunity to specialize.”
Read more from Gareth Dismore, co-founder of SearchSpring and a note from Peter Messana, SearchSpring's new CEO.
