Snapcommerce Bags $85M Growth Round For Commerce Messaging Platform

Toronto mobile commerce platform Snapcommerce wants to change the way we shop on our phones.

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Snapcommerce uses messaging to personalize mobile shopping experiences and show users the best promotional prices. The company’s first product, Snaptravel, provides travel and hotel search results using a text-like interface. Consumers saved more than 100,000 hours of shopping time and saw direct savings of more than $75 million dollars in direct savings over the past five years.

“It’s difficult to find a good deal,” Snapcommerce co-founder and CEO Hussein Fazal told Crunchbase News. “On your desktop you can open multiple windows and use platforms like Honey or Rakuten, but on mobile it is hard. Our unique platform centers around mobile commerce, and we use messaging as a tool to find great deals.”

Now armed with $85 million in new growth funding, the company plans to expand into new consumer verticals. The investment includes $65 million in equity and $20 million in debt/credit, Fazal said.

Inovia Capital and Lion Capital co-led the new round and were joined by Acrew DCF, Thayer Ventures and Full In Partners, as well as existing investors Telstra Ventures and Bee Partners. The additional funding represents Snapcommerce’s largest fundraise and gives it a total of $101.4 million in funding since the company was founded in 2016, according to Crunchbase data. It last raised a $7.2 million Series A in 2018.

Chris Arsenault, managing partner at Inovia Capital, said in an interview that Snapcommerce’s team painted a picture of a user experience through a journey, while other e-commerce companies just talk about the transaction.

“Knowing the management team really believes in the journey, Snapcommerce can provide services to satisfy the first need, then the second and the third, so there is huge potential to go into multiple verticals,” he added. “Users have access to the best prices and don’t need to go back to a desktop or tablet to open up tabs to make sure they got the best deal.”

Fazal intends to use the new funding to continue to grow Snapcommerce’s team with the aim of tripling it by the end of the year. The company is also doubling down on the travel space, and he expects to go into the goods vertical next. Additionally, it will work on technology development for customers during and after bookings — such as sending weather updates and links to call an Uber or manage a late hotel check-in — in order to maintain a two-way conversation.

Meanwhile, more than 100 million messages have been exchanged with over 10 million customers through the Snapcommerce platform to date, he said. In addition, the company is projected to cross over $1 billion in total mobile sales in 2021.

“Even through the pandemic, we were able to turn profitable in the third quarter of 2020,” Fazal added. “This enabled us to take control of our own destiny and raise a round like this. We also have plans to take the company public. We were able to build the type of company and vision of changing the way people shop on their phones, and are heading down a double-digital and triple-digital growth path.”

Feature photo of co-founders Hussein Fazaln and Henry Shi, as well as inset photo, courtesy of Snapcommerce
Blogroll illustration: Li-Anne Dias