Gorgias, developing customer service tools for e-commerce companies, raised $30 million in new Series C capital in a round that boosted its valuation to $710 million.
Transpose Platform and Shopify led the round and were joined by previous investors Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, Rajeev Dham from Sapphire Ventures, CRV, and Alven.
It’s been a few years since we profiled the company, whose total funding to date is $72.4 million. In late 2020, the company had raised $25 million in Series B funding on a $305 million valuation. The company was valued at $680 million prior to this round, Gorgias co-founder and CEO Romain Lapeyre told TechCrunch via email.
At the time of Series B, it was supporting more than 4,500 stores with its technology that brings all of the channels that shoppers use to contact online stores into one feed for each company. This way support tickets can be managed in a number of different ways, including live chat, email, phone, SMS, messaging apps, and social media.
Today, the six-year-old company is working with more than 10,000 online stores, including Princess Polly, Steve Madden, Olipop, and Marine Layer, which are selling products via Shopify, BigCommerce, and Adobe Commerce.
It also has grown to 245 employees across offices in San Francisco, Paris, Toronto, New York City, Sydney, Belgrade, and Charlotte.
Over the past year, Lapeyre said brands are seeing advertising costs rise on channels like Facebook and Google, in some cases five times their previous rates, “which is wearing that playbook thin.”
“Mix in continued supply chain issues and the higher cost of raw materials and direct-to-consumer brands are feeling the margin squeeze at both ends,” he added.
Instead, he believes that to succeed in this kind of environment, “DTC brands need to generate more money from their existing customers” by improving the customer experience. Gorgias offers insights on how to do that with a DTC growth playbook that Lapeyre estimates can result in 44% more revenue for its e-commerce customers.
Meanwhile, Gorgias more than doubled in size since its Series B, Lapeyre said. In addition to the 10,000 online stores and 245 employees, it has twice as many customers, and its annual recurring revenue and valuation have more than doubled as well.