Bloomreach Hits $2.2 Billion Valuation On Its Way To A ‘Post-Cookie’ World

As digital shoppers grow more sophisticated, so do their expectations. Bloomreach, a cloud-based e-commerce platform, helps businesses meet those expectations, using AI to ensure a smooth shopping experience across platforms and provide hyper-specific recommendations. And it does this without stalking consumers across the Internet, future-proofing its own customers as Safari, Firefox, and soon, Google, look to block third-party cookies in the name of privacy. 

 The first 20 years of online retail was pretty much limited to enabling businesses to build their e-commerce storefronts and transact online, Bloomreach CEO and cofounder Raj De Datta tells Forbes. “The next battlefield is to differentiate the experience.” 

 A comparatively new player in an industry that includes cloud commerce mammoths Salesforce and Adobe’s Magento, Bloomreach differentiates itself by being laser-focused on the needs of e-commerce entities,  De Datta says. The company also claims a unique data engine informed by billions of consumer profiles and products all aimed at keeping customers from abandoning their cards. On Wednesday, Bloomreach announced a $175 million in fresh funding, more than doubling its valuation to $2.2 billion. Goldman Sachs Asset Management led the round with participation from existing investors Bain Capital Ventures and Sixth Street Partners. 

 “Bloomreach’s larger, legacy competitors often struggle to provide a seamless customer experience as they integrate acquisitions and the market continues to transition to headless commerce experiences,” says  Stephen Kerns, a managing director at Goldman Sachs Growth Equity. 

 Bloomreach doesn’t offer commerce tools like carts and catalogs and instead partners with big commerce, says Joe Cicman, a senior analyst at Forrester. “Bloomreach wants to be great only on e-commerce sites. It allows them to go very deep rather than broad.”

 Take, for example, one of Bloomreach’s larger clients, athletic shoe company Puma. “If you go to their website and you search for athletic wear and athletic shoes, we know your preferences, we know what type of shoes you’re interested in, we know what sport you might have a preference in,” explains De Datta.  Bloomreach’s AI determines these preferences based on a customer’s activity within the website. “We really focus on first party data. We don’t use cookies and all these other third party trackers that sort of violate user privacy and that Apple and others are doing away with.” 

 De Datta, a serial entrepreneur and tech investor, and Ashutosh Garg, an ex-research scientist at Google, launched Bloomreach in 2009.  “When Bloomreach started, it was very much a search company,” De Datta tells Forbes. Since its early days, the company has added a spectrum of features, some of which were aided by acquisitions of tangential companies in the market such as web content management firm, Hippo and marketing automation firm, Exponea. 

 Bloomreach serves roughly 850 brands including Williams Sonoma and Torrid with its suite of tools like SEO recommendations, personalized email and SMS marketing campaigns, and blogs in three categories of discovery, engagement and content. Together they epitomize a digital shopping experience, De Datta says. “Commerce Experience Cloud is everything from the first moment of marketing touch until you buy the product.”

 The company currently has a team of 760 employees in three continents and $117 million in annual recurring revenue, plans to use the new investment to expand internationally in Germany and improve the personalization and data capabilities of its products. 

 De Datta says that the company is ripe for IPO in the next five years as it checks off all the metrics for a successful public company. “I think it would be natural as we chase this $20 billion opportunity,” he says. “It’s certainly on the cards… We’ll be watching market forces.”