The ecommerce market is on fire, and the growth of online commerce and ecommerce merchants is staggering. In 2022, 21% of sales are expected to be online, up 17.9% in just 2 years. And it’s still early days.
The ecommerce merchant (any brand or company that sells goods online) is one of the fastest growing new buyers, and there is a new ecommerce infrastructure ecosystem that has emerged to service their specific needs. These range from fintech companies providing financial products, SaaS companies helping them build/sell/support customers, logistics companies to ship faster, marketplace companies enabling new commerce channels, and the list goes on. This spans ecommerce native companies and large companies who are adapting their products to serve ecommerce merchants – as they see the growth in merchants and want to serve them.
To best serve ecommerce merchants, these companies are reliant on near real-time business status and performance data. For example, what products do these merchants offer, how has the store performed in the past few months, what are the most common orders, how much cash does the merchant have, and so on. All of this information is critical to understanding their customer; however retrieving that data has historically been extremely difficult, requiring dedicated engineering teams to build custom integrations to access these data platforms – and then even more engineering resources to maintain the connections over time. These data pipelines are crucial to serve these merchants, and when connections break, they sever key connections with customers. This is a massive pain point for companies looking to serve ecommerce merchants.
Solving this conundrum is Rutter, a universal API for commerce data.
Much like Plaid emerged to serve the growing wave of fintech companies in the mid-2010s and powered companies like Blend, Robinhood, and Venmo, Rutter is doing the same for commerce data to empower the next wave of ecommerce and commerce companies to be built without needing to reinvent the wheel every time.
Rutter empowers companies to read and write data across different ecommerce platforms, marketplaces, accounting systems, and payment processors. They have built APIs for important data (e.g. products, customers, transactions) needed from the key commerce platforms today (e.g. Shopify, Amazon, BigCommerce), in addition to integrations into the key accounting platforms for balance sheet data (e.g. Quickbooks, Xero, Netsuite, FreshBooks). This is incredibly useful for a variety of reasons: fintechs like Ramp, Airwallex, and Uncapped can leverage Rutter to access commerce data needed to extend loans, reconcile payments, or make acquisition offers; ecommerce companies like CJ Dopshipping, Printify, and Bluetale can use it to enable seamless drop shipping; and marketplaces like Orderchamp and Nextpaw can use it to launch into new geographies. They’re actively adding on new integrations and have a vision of being the standard API for all commerce data in the world.
We were impressed from the start when meeting Rutter’s cofounders, Peter and Eric. They’re exceptionally passionate about the customer problem, highly technical, and move incredibly fast. We got to know the team over the course of many months, and every time we chatted with them we were blown away by how much they’d learned, how quickly they’d built out new products, and how many new customers they’d brought on – all of whom rave about using the product. It’s the exact type of founders we like to back.
Since launching their commerce API last year, the company has become one of the fastest growing B2B companies we’ve ever met and has already processed billions of transactions. Customers are desperately pulling the product out of Rutter’s hands and continuously asking for more and more features to help them better serve ecommerce merchants and their users. It’s clear Rutter is well on its way to becoming the canonical source for commerce data and becoming a key component underpinning the growth of commerce and payments for the next decade and beyond. We’re excited to be supporting Rutter on this journey and leading their Series A. If you’re passionate about working on the future of commerce and fintech, they’re hiring.
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