The Week’s Biggest E-commerce Funding Rounds: Volta takes home €6M and Cardless raises $30M from big time investors

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This is a weekly feature that runs down the week’s top e-commerce deals. Check out the rest of this week's e-commerce news here.

Despite Thanksgiving last week and folks taking time to argue politics with their families, e-commerce companies were on the move, making deals! Here were last week's e-commerce seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest. 

1. Volta, a European startup that aims to be the Shopify for B2B transactions, raised €6M in a pre-seed round led by Emblem. Volta aims to digitize the catalog management process for midsized wholesale and distribution companies that still use paper catalogs and rely on manual order processing, with plans to add logistics integrations and financing options in the future.
2. Cardless, a San Francisco-based startup that helps companies launch and manage co-branded credit cards, raised $30M in a round led by Activant Capital at an undisclosed valuation. Although several major competitors exist in the space, the company claims that it's built a more efficient platform that offers a customized card experience to sign up and onboard users, as well as an embedded card application and management solution.
3. Trendyol, Turkey's leading e-commerce platform that's majority owned by Alibaba Group, is considering raising $1B to help its growth, according to people familiar with the matter. The company is informally soliciting interest from potential investors for a funding round that could kick off as soon as next quarter. Trendyol last raised $1.5B in 2021 from SoftBank and General Atlantic at a $16.5B valuation.
4. Amazon announced that it invested more than $1.49B across its retail and cloud businesses in Singapore in 2023 into improvements to its fulfillment centers, delivery stations, and data centers, as well as investments towards technology, safety, customer programs, and employee compensation. The company's investment in Singapore has supported more than 4,000 indirect jobs in areas like construction and logistics and more than 6,000 jobs that support sellers in the country.
5. Secret Sales, a UK-based online marketplace focused on offering discounted fashion and homeware products, acquired Afound, a discount online apparel retailer that launched in 2018 by H&M Group, for an undisclosed amount. This deal will enable Secret Sales to expand its footprint in the Nordics and follows the recent acquisitions of Dress for Less and Dreivip.com.
6. Movopack, an Italy-based startup that provides reusable packaging for e-commerce, raised £2M in a round led by 360 Capital. Movopack's packaging is made from recycled plastic bottles and woven recycled polypropylene and is designed to be reused by retailers up to 20 times. The funds will go towards the firm's official launch in the UK, marking its first expansion outside of Italy.
7. ShopDeck, a Bengaluru-based e-commerce enabler for D2C brands, raised $8M in a Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The company, which emerged from a pivot of a social commerce platform called WMall that shut down in 2022, previously renamed itself NuShop and later ShopDeck. It plans to use the funds to improve its AI technology and expand into Tier II and III cities.
8. Nice One Beauty, a Saudi Arabian online cosmetics retailer, plans to raise as much as $322M with an IPO in Riyadh, offering a 30% stake in the company. The funds will be used for working capital, development and marketing of its own brands, enhancing logistical capabilities, and general growth.
9. SALESmanago, a Polish customer engagement platform designed to help e-commerce marketing teams acquire customers through omnichannel experiences, acquired Leadoo, a Finland-based lead-driven marketing platform for businesses that offers chatbot solutions to generate leads and convert visitors into customers, for an undisclosed amount. SALESmango will integrate Leadoo's conversion expertise to build a CEP starter kit and growth framework, providing mid-market e-commerce businesses with advanced engagement and retention tools for customer acquisition.
10. /dev/agents, an AI startup co-founded by former Google, Stripe, and Meta executives, raised $56M in a round led by Index Ventures, alongside notable angel investors from Scale AI, Open AI, and Palo Alto Networks. The company aims to build an “operating system for AI agents” to fix the fragmented landscape of different operating systems and setups that it says is currently stalling adoption of the use of autonomous AI bots by businesses and consumers.
11. Nuqleous, an Arkansas software company specializing in retail analytics and space planning optimization, acquired Interactive Edge, a New York-based software platform for retail insights and reporting automation, for an undisclosed amount. The combination of the two platforms will enable its clients to automatically generate customized, data-driven presentations that use multiple data streams and adapt to each retailers' specific needs, which the company says is unprecedented in the industry. 

Stay Tuned!

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