Staytuned bags $34M in equity, debt to build ‘Salesforce suite for e-commerce’
Summary
Staytuned Digital has $34 million in new equity and debt to continue developing a software suite for e-commerce brands with a goal of what co-founder Serge Kassardjian described as the Salesforce suite for e-commerce stores.E-commerce has completely shifted and is moving to these emerging platforms, with Shopify being the biggest one, he said. To date, the company has raised $46.5 million in a combination of equity and debt.Investors in the new round include TenOneTen, Rembrandt VC, Hawke Ventures, DragonX, FJ Labs, Interlace, Riverpark Ventures, Comma Capital, Kotti Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, Jason Finger and a group of angel investors. Tacora Capital led the debt funding.TechCrunch profiled Staytuned back in 2019 when the company was focused on video. Kassardjian said that 11 months after starting the company, he and co-founder Randy Jimenez realized the product didnt work and did a hard pivot.We went to our board and told them that we had burned very little capital, say a half a million or so, Kassardjian said. We brought in a whole new set of investors as well, and every valuation has been higher and higher.Lauralynn Drury has since joined the founding team to help build the products and scale the strategy.The new funding will enable Staytuned to acquire more apps Kassardjian said there is a long pipeline of potential apps to acquire hire additional engineers and scale faster.Software is super high-margin and it grows faster than Shopify, while Shopify grows faster than the e-commerce ecosystem, Kassardjian said.