The ecommerce industry has boomed in recent years — not only through the success of major online retailers, but also because of a legion of smaller vendors selling largely through platforms like Shopify and Amazon.
Culver City-based Assembly is focused on providing online retailers large and small with the tools and insights needed to grow their businesses. The company, which launched just three years ago, has quickly emerged as a leading developer of business software for the ecommerce industry, and on April 25 announced that it had acquired market intelligence software company PipeCandy Inc. to bolster its offerings to customers.

“We’re opening up an exciting new front,” said Assembly Chief Product Officer Benjamin Collier. “This is really setting up Assembly to be a source of omnichannel information for the merchants that we serve.”
Financial terms of the PipeCandy deal were not disclosed, but the acquisition adheres to Assembly’s past strategy of expanding the scope and capabilities of its software through the strategic purchase of companies operating in a similar space.

Assembly began its operations in 2019 with the purchase of Helium 10, the Irvine-based developer of a software platform aimed at merchants selling through online marketplaces operated by Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc. Since then, the company has also purchased Refersion and Pacvue, two companies that also develop software for online vendors.

The platforms developed by each of these companies continue to operate as distinct entities within Assembly’s suite of product offerings, and Collier said the same will be true of PipeCandy. The company, which has offices in Walnut and in India, tracks more than 5 million online retailers and offers data and market insights derived from billions of dollars in transactions.

Collier said PipeCandy’s market intelligence platform is uniquely suited for direct-to-consumer vendors — an important segment of the ecommerce industry that Assembly had been looking to better serve.
These retailers, said Collier, have different needs than those selling through major marketplace platforms, and PipeCandy’s platform is already capable of offering valuable assistance.

“They are really the only vertical data-as-a-service company providing this type of insight,” Collier said. “Merchants can use it to understand what’s going on in their category, who their competition is—and that can inform everything from advertising to social media strategy.”
The PipeCandy acquisition comes less than a year after Assembly announced in September that it had completed a funding round led by Advent International that valued the company at more than $1 billion.

Assembly’s product offerings, which are available to merchants on a subscription basis, are currently used by more than 60,000 vendors. Collier said the company’s goal is to fully centralize all the tools these retailers need to run their businesses effectively.
“Our products are effectively the operating system of their businesses,” Collier said. “The folks who use our tools are able to grow their businesses a lot more rapidly than those who are trying to manually control things and piece together insights.”