San Francisco-based GearLaunch today announced that it has received $4.8 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Hunt Technology Ventures, the venture capital investing company of renowned investor David Hunt. Hunt’s extensive experience in the ecommerce space provides GearLaunch with ecommerce expertise and connections to help the company forge strategic collaborations with key ecommerce partners.
“Hunt Technology Ventures focuses on disruptive ideas and relentless founders, and we found both in GearLaunch.”
GearLaunch offers a sophisticated platform — or end-to-end (E2E) commerce – which is a rapidly emerging category of ecommerce that enables independent online merchants easily to scale online businesses. The company provides not only the tools to create online storefronts but also back office support and logistics, including production, shipping and customer service.
GearLaunch Dashboard
“Hunt Technology Ventures focuses on disruptive ideas and relentless founders, and we found both in GearLaunch,” said Hunt Technology Ventures principal David Hunt. “A global army of independent online retailers are out-maneuvering large, slow conglomerates in local, niche and, eventually, mass markets, which plays perfectly into GearLaunch’s vision.”
Thatcher Spring, founder and CEO of GearLaunch
Using such platforms as Shopify and Amazon’s affiliate program, merchants struggle to access customers for their products, to gain entry to foreign market distribution, to arrange customer service in local languages and to organize payment services. GearLaunch solves this problem and empowers ecommerce entrepreneurs with 360 degree support. The company’s E2E commerce toolset helps to create sustainable online businesses independently without a need to hire teams.
In an exclusive interview with Newscenter.io, Thatcher Spring, founder and CEO of GearLaunch, said that his company’s unique model allowed GearLaunch to become profitable early on. This is the first time the company has raised financing since its start in 2013.
GearLaunch receives a cut from every product sold from its platform-enabled ecommerce sites. According to Spring, the company achieved more than $90 million in gross merchandise sales last year and has facilitated the selling of more than 4.5 million products across more than 2,500 merchant sites to date.
The company currently employs 50 people and will expand its staff further with this new funding.