Alloy Automation Raises $20 Million Series A, Led by Andreessen Horowitz, to Build the Operating System for Ecommerce

The new funding will accelerate the company’s vision to become the connection hub for all ecommerce tools, and the control panel from which brands can automate work.

Alloy Automation, a no-code ecommerce automation platform, today announced a $20 million Series A investment led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The Series A includes participation from FirstMark Capital and Hawke Ventures; the executives of Casper, Hims, and Glossier; and the founders of unicorn ecommerce software companies Klaviyo, ReCharge, Attentive, and more. This brings the company’s total funding to $27 million since it was founded two years ago by Sara Du and Gregg Mojica. Alloy Automation will use this new capital to double its team in 2022 and forge deeper partnerships with renowned brands and key players in the ecommerce ecosystem.

With tailwinds from the pandemic, ecommerce has seen an explosion of new tooling. Brands now run their online stores with specialized applications, covering everything from loyalty points to return logistics, rather than building in-house engineering teams. The increasing complexity of the ecommerce stack also brings headaches in managing data and tasks across dozens of tools.

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Alloy is building the solution for this: a platform with deep integrations to all key ecommerce tools and an easy-to-use interface for anyone to automate their workflows. Anyone who works with ecommerce tooling can install Alloy to empower the rest of their team. A range of companies, from emerging brands like Bokksu, to giants like Burberry, have used Alloy to streamline their increasingly complex technology setup. Agencies in the space, such as Red Antler also have turned to Alloy for their work.

“Brands are just waking up to the possibilities of automation, and the benefits of having a single dashboard for them to coordinate work across their tool stack,” said Sara Du, co-founder and CEO of Alloy Automation. “Our goal is to make more time available for brands to focus on the strategy and creative work that give their brand life. My own failure in building a streetwear brand stemmed from not wanting to do mind-numbing operations tasks. From that experience, I figured there must be a way to package standard tasks into automations. Our team at Alloy, equal parts retired brand owners and optimistic software engineers, is energized by this beautiful vision of automation.”

Alloy’s thousands of users are seeing the benefits of Du’s vision for an automated future. “Having built an engineering team here, I can say that this is the solution for truly saving time and money, while enabling the nontechnical team members to execute on their strategies in a no-code way,” said Rich Fulop, the founder of Brooklinen.

Alloy’s platform offers a single dashboard from which brands can control and link both data and actions across all the apps they use. Alloy’s verticalized approach has major benefits over more horizontal automation alternatives:

• Customizable workflow engine that lets users draw diagrams that link their apps to orchestrate marketing and operations-related work.
• 200+ integrations that span categories like ERP, 3PL, loyalty, ESP, etc. This impressive array of connectors also includes a full-fledged Netsuite integration and support for headless ecommerce platforms.
• Workflow recipe library that gives brands hundreds of simple, pre-built automations to start from. For example, brands can set up an automation for custom low inventory notifications to their suppliers, or automatically create deals in Salesforce for B2B orders.

“We’ve seen tremendous growth in the e-commerce software space, especially with thousands of new small businesses bringing stores online, but the modern e-commerce stack often has dozens of disparate tools that aren’t integrated,” said David Ulevitch, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who is joining the board with this funding round. “The Alloy team has figured out how to build a flexible integration and data mapping platform that ties these tools together to enable more insights and more programmatic levers to run a best-in-class e-commerce business. Every e-commerce site should be using Alloy.”

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