From open source roots to e-commerce giants: partnering with Vue Storefront
Felix Capital leads Vue Storefront’s $20m equity round to create the category leader in Front-end as a Service.
Left to Right: Vue Storefront team — Patrick, Tim, G, Bart and Filip
eCommerce is an ecosystem near and dear to our hearts at Felix. Over the past 8 years, we have made a number of investments in both products and platforms, ranging from Mirakl, Prediko and Forter on the SaaS side, to the likes of Farfetch and Mejuri as digitally native branded experiences. We have more than 20 companies in our portfolio either selling products digitally, or providing the underlying technology to do so. With this level of oversight, we have been closely tracking the rise of headless commerce and believe it has the potential to reshape the digital landscape.
The headless wave builds momentum
The traditional eCommerce stack has been built around monolithic platforms which tie together front-end and back-end functionality. This architecture is simple and low cost, but ultimately limiting, as it restricts businesses from delivering unique shopping experiences across channels. By separating the front-end and back-end via a headless stack, businesses can create a more modular, flexible architecture that allows for greater innovation and agility. In an ever more competitive online world where customer acquisition costs continue to rise and retention is increasingly more important, we believe brands who provide unique, high performance customer experiences will rise to the top… and those experiences will be powered by headless infrastructure.
“There are three drivers generally for companies adopting this architecture, either you have a need for speed to react to the market, you need greater channel and GTM flexibility, or you need better and more integrated omni-channel business processes.”
Casper Rasmussen, President, MACH Alliance
Introducing Vue, defining the category of Front-end as a Service (FEaaS)
Vue was launched in 2020 and has emerged as the category leader for frontend digital solutions. As a pioneer in Frontend as a Service (FEaaS), Vue Storefront provides businesses with SaaS tools to create immersive and intuitive digital experiences. Their first product, Storefront UI, enables merchants to create stunning online stores with a fully customisable design system and UI library. This is paired with their API Orchestration layer to enable customers to create fully bespoke headless experiences, connecting all their services under a single API. The cloud-based, composable, and mobile-first technology connects e-commerce platforms with headless content management systems, payment systems, search providers and other third-party services. VSF is the fastest-growing frontend project in the world, supported by an active community of open-source enthusiasts.
Over the past 12 months, the company has experienced rapid growth, increasing revenue more than 300%, serving customers such as Berlin Brand Group, Zenith Watches, Orgill, Tally Weijl, Zenniand, Zadig & Voltaire, scaling the team to over 100 people in 10 countries and creating a more than 19,000-strong open-source developer community. Vue Storefront is now being used to power the online stores of over 2,200 retailers and merchants across the globe. The team is also making strong progress in the large US market, with half the pipeline coming from US opportunities despite only having a few team members on the ground there today.
Our first Polish partnership
Over the past few years, we have spoken to many players in the headless ecosystem and were unable to find the right combination of strong commercial traction and product excellence, until we met the team at Vue Storefront. We first identified the company two years ago during a thematic deepdive however it was too early for our investment focus at the time. We kept close track of Vue over these years, and jumped at the opportunity to partner with them during this funding round.
Patrick, Bart and Filip are a highly complementary founding team, with a unique combination of prior entrepreneurial experience, domain knowledge, and strong commercial skillsets. They were joined by Gordana Vuckovic, their CRO, formerly with ContentStack based in California and just hired Tim Drivjers, as the new CTO of the company, who spent the last 7 years at Sendcloud as CTO.
They have created a culture of excellence and transparency, positioning Vue as a hub for tech talent not just in Poland, but also globally. We have been watching the Polish ecosystem develop over the past 5 years, with numerous high quality start-ups being established throughout the country on the back of an emerging wave of entrepreneurs with global ambitions.
We are thrilled to be able to partner with Patrick, Bart, Filip, Gordana, Tim and the whole team at Vue, as well as our first co-investment alongside our friends at Creandum and Earlybird.
