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Kelly Goetsch, chief operating officer of Pipe17. (Pipe17 Photo)
Pipe17, a Seattle startup that built a platform to manage e-commerce operations, announced today that it has raised a $15.5 million Series A round and hired its first chief operations officer.
New COO Kelly Goetsch was previously chief strategy officer at commercetools, a German company supporting digital commerce that has worldwide operations and raised more than $300 million. He also co-founded and led the MACH Alliance, an industry group promoting MACH (microservices, APIs, cloud-based and headless) technologies.
“Joining Pipe17 feels like history repeating itself,” Goetsch said in a statement. “When I joined commercetools, I saw a massive market opportunity to redefine how businesses power ecommerce via headless and composable commerce infrastructure — and we did exactly that. Now, with Pipe17, I see the same potential.”
Pipe17 has raised a total of $25 million since its launch in 2019 — which came shortly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and a surge in online shopping.
The startup built an artificial intelligence technology that tackles seemingly every aspect of e-commerce, including management of supply chain, pricing, order processing, inventory data, warehousing, order routing and delivery logistics.
Pipe17’s customers include retailers such as Allbirds, Made In Cookware, Orthofeet and MaryRuth Organics, and logistics providers including Ryder, UPS and FedEx.
Mo Afshar is Pipe17’s co-founder and CEO. He was previously CEO of Spoken Communications, a Seattle company that used speech recognition technology to automate processes in call centers. It was acquired by Avaya in 2018.
John Shao, Pipe17’s chief technologist, worked with Afshar at Avaya and Spoken Communications, and also held engineering roles at Ayasdi, Oracle, VMware and elsewhere.
Pipe17 co-founder and head of product Dave Shaffer worked at Oracle and Workato.
The startup’s headcount is 58.
The new funding round was led by LFX Venture Partners. Current investors including GLP also participated.
