We raised $8M Seed round for our open source Shopify challenger

Other links

• TechCrunch: Medusa’s open source e-commerce tool for JavaScript developers aims to take on Shopify
• Business Wire: Medusa Raises $8m to Build the Leading E-Commerce Platform for Developers
• Own blog: Announcement: Medusa's $8M USD Seed Round

Today, we are excited to announce our $8m USD Seed round led by LocalGlobe and Dawn Capital, with the participation of prominent tech leaders such as Anthony Casalena (Squarespace CEO & founder), Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia founder), and Scott Williamson (Ex-CPO Gitlab).

The fundraise is happening less than a year after we launched our solution to the developer community. In record time, Medusa has seen unparalleled growth among open source solutions, becoming the most starred Javascript e-commerce platform on GitHub in only eight months, likewise surpassing established platforms such as WooCommerce and Magento.

Medusa aims to solve the developer headache often associated with the hacky workarounds required for customizations in Shopify and other e-commerce platforms. Out of the box, Medusa provides similar core functionality as Shopify, but through its powerful abstraction-based architecture customizations and maintenance are much easier to handle for developers as business needs evolve.

The platform gives developers control of their stack by easily connecting to APIs of payment providers, logistics tools, CMSs, and other systems while enabling a native omnichannel setup through its headless architecture. See integration library.

Investors believe in a developer-focused JS-solution

With the investment, we bring great capacity onboard with some of the leading European VCs. Common for the investment teams have been their shared believe that new developer-focused alternatives were needed in the e-commerce industry and that Medusa has what it takes to become #1 here.

“Medusa immediately attracted our attention with their unique open-source product. Balancing the right level of a user-friendly API-first approach with a great degree of customizability, Medusa's product is a dream for developers and merchants who need to customize their platforms while maintaining maximum performance and response times,” said Mina Mutafchieva, partner at Dawn. “For all the breakneck innovation we have seen in the frontend, the majority of e-commerce sites sit on legacy platforms, such as Magento, CommerceCloud, etc. Even Shopify, which has transformed access to e-commerce for smaller merchants, is already 15 years old.  **As a result, the pain points for e-commerce merchants are exploding and most, if not all, we at Dawn have spoken to in the last two years, use inefficient "work-arounds" to achieve their business goals.”

The developer-centric approach is likewise one of the reasons why LocalGlobe holds faith in Medusa’s platform. “With its open-source approach based on Javascript, we think the Medusa team is building the most powerful platform to power the next generation of e-commerce experiences as demonstrated by the fact that developers love the product and are adopting it at an unprecedented rate," said George Henry, general partner at LocalGlobe.

What does the fundraise mean for our users?

In short, this fundraise will enable us to build an even better product! The resources will be used to double down on our development efforts and strengthening our open source solution. This will remain our core focus and we will start growing our core engineering team further (yes, we are hiring 😉).

We will likewise start rolling out a managed services offering for agency partners and merchants that are interested in getting rid of infrastructure concerns or want SLA-backed support. You can find more info on this on medusajs.com.

If you are interested in knowing more about Medusa, head straight to Medusajs.com or visit our GitHub repo for a sneak peek into our future roadmap.