Why we invested in Vue Storefront
and why it is building the “head for headless commerce” 😇🚀
We are more than excited to be investing in the Series A of Vue Storefront as we believe the company is strongly positioned to become a global category leader in the front end e-commerce software tech stack. Also, we are thrilled to be co-investing with our friends at Creandum and Earlybird plus an impressive band of angels. As we often do when investing, we would like to share with our community a couple more thoughts on why we have decided to invest in the newest members of our portfolio:
📈📈📈 A tectonic shift in the global e-commerce macro trend:
2020 has been the year that transformed the status quo of e-commerce globally and catapulted consumers' habits in the future. One research article of McKinsey suggested that the first quarter of 2020 compressed 10 years of growth in 3 months.
More recent research supports the notion that new customers` preferences and behaviours are here to stay
On the back of this explosive growth and paradigm shift, a company like Commercetools was able to raise in Sept 2021 a $140M Series C with a $1.9BN valuation. To help understand the magnitude of this market push, Commercetools raised at a $300M valuation just 2 years ago. On a smaller scale, a company from Prato, Tuscany (Italy) called Commercelayer was able to raise in rapid succession a series B from Coatue and a series A from Benchmark (if you want to know more about the new wave of Italian tech , here is my take on it 🍕🍝). Vue Storefront’s product is in our opinion well-equipped to ride this wave.
📡📡📡 Headless, a fast-growing technology approach, moves into commerce:
Similar to what happened in the content management system (CMS) space (a market now growing at 22.6% CAGR and with notable rounds raised from the likes of Contentful) in the e-commerce software tools, we are witnessing a technology approach shift from monolithic infrastructure into headless. When related to e-commerce, “headless” is an architectural approach where the front end (the presentation layer customers interact with) and the back end (background processes and commerce functionality) of the system are separated and communicate via APIs. This approach allows picking and choosing the best possible services and glue them together, providing stronger performance and higher development speed. Vue Storefront's offering of a headless front end is capturing this tech trend fully and is a key part of our investment thesis. To use the team's words, the company is offering the “head for headless commerce”.
We are not new to investing in the headless space, as we have been backing Graph CMS (the leading headless CMS with a focus on GraphQL API) from pre-seed to Series A.
🌍🌍🌍 Open-source approach and a thriving community:
We are strong believers in open source as an approach to build but also to distribute products (expect to hear more about this investment thesis from me soon) and the core product of Vue Storefront is in fact open source (here a link to their code). Vue Storefront can count on a vibrant community of 270 contributors and a Discord channel with 1,600 members.
👩🚀👨🚀👩🚀 An amazing team:
15 minutes into the first call with Patrick and we knew that this was a match as he has that rare combination of smartness, warrior-attitude and people skills. A very similar picture holds true with Bart, a seasoned repeating founder, taking care of company building and internal processes and with Filip who brings to the table 10 years of e-commerce front end development.
That's it, folks! I hope this post can be useful to founders and fellow co-investors out there that maybe are curious to know more about our investments. From now on I will be the Paua Ventures Chief Cheerleader for Vue Storefront and I look forward to supporting the team any way I can.
If you are a founder and this investment thesis resonate with what you are building feel free to ping me at federico@pauaventures.com
