Symphony Commerce raises $11 million to help brands offer faster shipping

Symphony Commerce, a provider of cloud technology for e-commerce platforms, is raising $11 million to grow its fulfillment business. Charles River Ventures, Blue Cloud Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and FirstMark Capital invested in the round.

Symphony, which helps companies like Gatorade and Hershey’s manage their web business, is doubling down on its logistics services, by helping these brands enable faster shipping. With order management tools and a network of warehouses, Symphony says its offerings will make it easier for large companies to provide two-day shipping or even same-hour delivery in major metropolitan areas.

Pressure from competition like Amazon and on-demand delivery apps has resulted in higher expectations from customers. So that’s why Symphony will now be making fulfillment capabilities a greater focus and can provide these services as a standalone offering.

Shipping efficiency remains “largely an unsolved problem,” CEO Harish Abbott tells TechCrunch. “How do you make sure the order gets fulfilled on time, accurately and cost effectively?”

Symphony, which also provides the developer tools to create and run these websites, sees themselves as a “commerce-as-a-service” business. They help beverage companies and fashion brands with everything from web design to inventory management.

“Being an online store is not enough, you need to be able to manage these orders and fulfill these orders,” Devdutt Yellurkar, general partner at Charles River Ventures, says about why he invested. “Symphony is unique because they bring all these capabilities in one platform.”

Ajay Agarwal, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures, says that he believes Symphony “has built the first full stack cloud commerce solution.” He said that clients “recognize their needs to build a direct-to-consumer presence.”

Others in the space include Magento, BigCommerce, Shopify and Demandware. While there are differences in some of the offerings and each has a separate niche, there are a lot of businesses who are looking to capitalize on the massive online shopping industry

Symphony has previously raised $39 million in funding.