Nantes-based Akeneo, which provides a Product Experience Management (PXM) platform for corporate brands and retailers, has raised €41 million in a Series C funding round led by Summit Partners. Existing investors Alven, Partech, and Salesforce Ventures, as well as Akeneo’s board member Stephan Dietrich, also participated in the round.
Akeneo’s open source SaaS platform helps brands tell a consistent product story, create an emotional connection with customers, and accelerate time-to-market and global expansion with a centralised hub to manage product information and assets across all sales channels.
Both B2C and B2B brands and retailers are increasingly relying on unified product information to deliver compelling and relevant customer experiences across sales channels. Akeneo is now the most used product information management (PIM) platform in the world with 60,000 live implementations, and has achieved compound triple-digit revenue growth for six consecutive years. Its clients include international brands such as Sephora, Fossil, and Staples CA.
Akeneo is a global company with more than 180 employees across six countries, including France, Germany, the UK, Spain, the US, and Israel. The new funding comes on the heels of a series of corporate milestones for Akeneo, including the acquisition of AI startup Sigmento, integration with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and a strategic premier technology partnership with Magento, an Adobe company.
“In an omnichannel world, PXM represents the next evolution of product information management, which is becoming the new CRM of product data,” said Steffan Peyer, a principal at Summit Partners who will join the Akeneo Board of Directors. “We believe Akeneo’s highly-focused product approach, as well as its hyper-connectivity with the broader commerce stack, makes it uniquely capable of addressing complex and specific customer product information needs.”
With the new funding, Akeneo intends to continue to invest further in its sales and marketing efforts in the US, while doubling down on research and development, including product data intelligence to boost product information automation and monitor product experience quality. The company also plans to hire more than 100 additional staff in the upcoming year to support this next round of rapid growth.
“PXM is becoming a critical business application for brands and distributors to win in omnichannel retail,” said Fred de Gombert, CEO and co-founder of Akeneo. “Today’s consumers average more than five touchpoints before they make a purchasing decision, so it is increasingly important for brands to use a platform that delivers an integrated and consistent product experience.”
“With Summit’s extensive experience scaling global SaaS businesses and our existing investors’ continued support, we look forward to helping more brands and retail merchants deliver seamless product experiences with even greater efficiency and scale.”