Shogun Raises $35M to Democratize Ecommerce for All

Nearly six years ago, my co-founder Nick and I started Shogun as a side project.

Shogun began as a drag-and-drop editor for Ruby on Rails websites. Our goal was to create a product that empowered marketing teams to make changes to websites without needing to go through developers. (And maybe make enough money from it to cover the cost of dinner once in a while.)

Unfortunately, our app for Rails websites didn’t get much traction. When we asked for feedback, an agency we knew alerted us to a lack of quality page builders for the ecommerce industry. We took that insight and decided to build a version of our app for Shopify stores.

Shortly after we released Shogun Page Builder on the Shopify App Store, customers started trickling in. We’ve continued to grow rapidly ever since. 

Today, over 15,000 agencies and brands — including UNTUCKit, NOMAD, Timbuk2, We Make Websites, DYODE and Lucid — use Shogun Page Builder. 

We’re honored that ecommerce stores in over 100 countries around the world trust Shogun Page Builder to create and customize their online storefronts. And we’re proud to have over 2,100 positive reviews and a 4.8-star rating in the Shopify App Store as a Shopify Plus Certified App Partner.

Now, we’re excited to announce another milestone: Shogun raised $35M in Series B funding led by Accel with participation from Initialized Capital, VMG Partners and Y Combinator.

"It’s rare that you come across a company that has three major secular tailwinds at its back,” said Ethan Choi, a partner at Accel. “Shogun is experiencing phenomenal growth thanks to 1. the explosion of ecommerce, 2. the low-code-no-code movement democratizing software for non-developers and 3. the headless commerce wave enabling a better end-user experience for customers.” 

This funding will help us continue to innovate and develop tools that help brands reduce their reliance on ecommerce goliaths like Amazon, and build their own unique online experiences to better serve their customers.

Additionally, with five years of industry knowledge and a deep understanding of marketing- and merchandising-team-member pain points, we’ve released a new product: Shogun Frontend. 

Shogun Frontend is an end-to-end headless commerce solution built for enterprise-grade experience management and sub-second page loads. It takes the complexities and benefits of building a headless commerce system and progressive web app storefront and packages it into a team-accessible, next-generation eCommerce experience platform (eXP). 

Earlier this year, COVID-19 spread rapidly, causing many retailers to shut down their physical operations and rethink their sales strategies. Retailers used our tools to bring their stores online quickly, helping them reduce the loss in sales they would have endured otherwise. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve seen a 50% increase in the baseline usage of Shogun Page Builder. 

The pandemic ignited rapid growth in ecommerce that we expect to only increase from here. We will continue our mission to build products that help all retailers build unique online experiences for their brands.

“Finbarr and Nick are the kind of founders that we love to work with. Smart, humble, product-focused and customer-obsessed,” said Choi. “Accel and I are thrilled to partner with them and the entire Shogun team in their mission to empower merchants to create extraordinary ecommerce experiences for their customers. The Shogun team has not only built two exceptional products in Page Builder and Frontend, but a special company and culture that has attracted outstanding talent across all levels."

Thank you to everyone who has supported our team and vision throughout this journey. We’re excited to continue investing into the ecommerce industry and help brands create experiences their customers love. 

We truly value our team members and partners who have made this possible, and we will continue to push forward until we democratize ecommerce for all.