With a new injection of funding, Linnworks, a U.K.-based commerce automation platform, plans to quintuple its Austin workforce from 40 to 200 people over the next two or three years as it prepares to compete in the U.S. market.
Linnworks employs 258 people globally, with offices in Austin and Tallinn, Estonia. The new Austin positions will mostly be in sales, marketing, customer success, professional services and product.
Linnworks CEO Callum Campbell said the Austin team will soon be relocating to a larger office to accommodate the larger workforce as it seeks “global market leadership.”
“It’s really part of a full go-to-market investment into the (U.S.) territory. ... We’re really investing deep to make sure there’s fantastic infrastructure on the ground locally in market to ensure that, as we bring customers onto the platform, they have a really strong experience with Linnworks,” Campbell told Built In.
Founded in 2010, the company has bootstrapped for its first 11 years before announcing a majority growth investment on Wednesday. The funding came from Marlin Equity Partners, a global investment firm with over $7.6 billion in capital under management. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The Linnworks platform allows brands and retailers to manage their inventory, orders and fulfillment from a single dashboard.
To put it another way, Linnworks allows its customers to push a single product listing to multiple online stores – not just Amazon and eBay, but also to social media marketplaces and category-specific websites like Wayfair.
As orders come in, Linnworks’ software communicates the reduced inventory availability to each of the platforms. The company also compiles the orders from all of the various platforms into one central dashboard, where the retailer can then process the orders for shipping.
“We help brands and retailers take their products and sell them to their customers, wherever their customers choose to shop. It’s all about multi-channel selling, but not just multi-channel selling; it’s multi-channel operations as well,” Campbell said. “We integrate shipping providers and third-party logistics centers all into one central hub.”
Linnworks has historically worked with smaller companies, but more recently has worked with companies in the $1.5 million to $50 million range. Linnworks also works with larger enterprises like Ford, Disney and Casio.
The company operates in more than 140 countries. As both Amazon and eBay’s largest European commerce partner, Linnworks processes more than $9 billion gross merchandise value each year globally.
The investment will allow Linnworks to scale its product capabilities and accelerate the company’s global expansion.
“In order to capture every revenue opportunity, brands are recognizing the need to not only increase the number of channels they sell on but also integrate those channels for a frictionless, more personalized customer experience,” Campbell said in a statement. “With Marlin’s shared vision and support, we are excited to expand our offerings and deepen our capabilities to support our customers’ evolving needs and enable brands to scale.”
