Santa Monica-based startup Nacelle Inc. announced Jan. 13 that it had pulled in $18 million in a Series A funding round led by Canadian venture capital firm Inovia Capital Inc.
Nacelle is the developer of a content management system for ecommerce businesses. According to the company, its platform ensures shoppers experience rapid load speeds and a seamless checkout process when purchasing items online.
Evidently, the company’s retail platform has the attention of investors. The Series A funding round comes only seven months after Nacelle announced it had taken in $4.8 million in seed funding.
Previous investors Index Ventures and Accomplice also took part in the most recent funding round, the company said.
Nacelle was founded in 2019 by software engineer Brian Anderson, who previously founded ShopElf, an agency providing web services to vendors using the ecommerce platform developed by Shopify Inc.
Anderson said Nacelle’s platform allows companies to easily improve the online shopping experience for customers at a relatively low cost. “Over the last decade, technology has changed the world of ecommerce,” Anderson said in a statement. “Merchants want to offer their customers the best shopping experience, which means load times and shopping (user experience) is top of mind for the fastest growing (direct-to-consumer) brands.”
According to Nacelle, the latest funding round will allow the company to nearly triple in size over the next year as it builds up a team of web developers and sales and marketing professionals.
The company has a growing list of customers, including fashion brand Something Navy, jewelry retailer Enso Rings and Agoura Hills-based loungewear firm Barefoot Dreams Inc.
According to Nacelle, Something Navy began using the company’s platform to handle high traffic volumes that the brand had attracted during a partnership with Nordstrom Inc.
The new online store launched in July and quickly generated more than $1 million in sales with loading speeds up to 600 times faster than rival ecommerce sites, Nacelle says.
In a statement, Something Navy Chief Executive Matt Scanlan said Nacelle’s platform “changed our company and allowed us to scale.”
