A secretive e-commerce software developer called Sellvana secured $5 million for its seed funding round, VentureBeat reported. The names of the investors in New York and other funding specifics were not disclosed. The company has also remained tight-lipped about other details regarding the company, such as information about clients who are currently beta testing the platform.
VentureBeat learned that this was how Sellvana Chief Financial Officer Felix Machlis prefers things, for now at least. Machlis told VentureBeat in an interview, "We see an opportunity for a better performing e-commerce platform. There is a revolution in e-commerce open source software. Sellvana is easy to use, and learn."
Sellvana users are greeted by a simple "soon you will enjoy ecommerce" when they visit the website. The company, launched last year, is run by a Portland, Oregon team of six people. It is not in stealth mode and intends to provide its services to small and medium sized e-commerce firms, the report said.
Co-Founder Boris Gurvich is a Belarusian native who wrote PHP open source code for eBay-owned e-commerce platform Magento. He is the public face of Sellvana. Machlis, meanwhile, is taking care of the marketing side of things and in expanding the firm. He once worked with Goldman Sachs and TIAA-CREF, a financial services firm, the report said.
Although both of them admitted that there were many players in the e-commerce software space, with eBay and Amazon as its more prominent names, Gurvich and Machlis said today's platforms do not possess the functionality and usability that developers and consumers want. They added that there were already a number of mid-range e-commerce sites using their software successfully. However, it is not their objective to monetize open source software. Machlis said they will be revealing the details in the next few months, the report said.
Machlis told VentureBeat, "Based on our core properties, our simplicity of use for developers, consumers and merchants, we are well positioned."
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