Our Sound Investment in SoundCommerce

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Emergence has excitedly supported the explosive rise of the Modern Cloud Data Stack. In a previous blog post, “The Next Wave of Industry Cloud is Data,” we shared how we view the emerging Modern Cloud Data Stack and we also opened up about the big opportunity we see to build an industry cloud data company that is deeply focused on one industry vertical.

Industry cloud data companies will ingest data from vertically specific data sources, pipe that data into industry tuned data schema, and subsequently trigger insights and workflow actions within the industry-specific applications where business users do their work.

In short, we continue to be bullish on industry cloud data companies that are building vertical-specific systems to uniquely target data challenges that horizontal data companies cannot solve out of the box.

Using our Industry Cloud framework, we evaluated multiple industries to determine which ones are most primed for a vertical data company. After exhaustive research, we selected the $5T retail market. Pre-COVID, e-commerce penetration was growing at ~1% per year in the US and 2.5% in the UK. It goes without saying that the pandemic has vastly increased these numbers—5% in the US and 10% in the UK. In other words, COVID has forever changed consumers’ shopping habits and accelerated e-commerce adoption 5 years into the future.

“Every brick and mortar retailer is now an e-commerce company.”

This statement is almost cliché by now, but the acceleration in e-commerce adoption caught the majority of retailers off guard, and they are now scrambling to adapt. In order to compete with the likes of Amazon, retailers need to harness the full power of their data.

Today, every decision must be optimized in real-time for profit and customer lifetime value, all across an omnichannel footprint. This challenge cannot be solved with a new hire or purchase of simple software; in order to compete, retailers need a total overhaul of their data systems. They need to understand their data at an order and customer level across multiple channels, which requires tying together data across multiple systems that are often sitting in silos. For most retailers, this is simply too complex to build on their own.

Emergence has scoured the DataOps landscape looking at all parts of the ecosystem. When we met the SoundCommerce Founders and heard their vision of building out an entire data stack for the commerce industry, we knew immediately that we had found the needle in the haystack.

Today, we are excited to officially announce that SoundCommerce has joined the Emergence Family.

We believe CEO Eric Best and CTO Jared Stiff are uniquely positioned to build an iconic industry cloud data company. With a shared vision and infectious passion for commerce, they have been working together for the last 20+ years. Their first company, founded at the height of the dom-com era sold to Amazon, and their second venture Mercent ($30B+ in annual GMV) sold to CommerceHub.

Eric and Jared understand commerce better than nearly every other founder we have met, but what is even more critical is their experience and deep connections into the commerce market. They deeply believe that a vertical data company will be able to onboard and service commerce companies better, and we agree.

We are excited to watch SoundCommerce tailor the modern data stack for commerce companies in a way that just works for their specific needs and unlocks tremendous value.