Today, we’re thrilled to announce our investment in Shogun, the leading e-commerce Experience Platform (eXP), that is empowering over 15,000 e-commerce merchants across 100 countries to build beautiful and performant website experiences for their customers. 

We’re excited to be joined by our friends at Initialized, VMG, and Y Combinator, as well as web design and e-commerce leaders, including Bryant Chou (CTO at Webflow), Mark Lavelle and Mark Lenhard (former CEO and SVP of Strategy at Magento, respectively), Alex O’Byrne (CEO of WeMakeWebsites, a leading Shopify agency), Brian Grady (CEO of Gorilla Group, a leading Magento agency), and Romain Lapeyre (CEO of Gorgias).

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It’s rare that you come across a company with three major secular tailwinds at its back. Shogun is experiencing rapid growth thanks to 1) the explosion of e-commerce, 2) the low-code-no-code movement that’s democratizing software for non-developers, and 3) the JAMstack and headless wave that’s redefining frontend web development.

It’s an incredible time to be in e-commerce. We’ve seen a decade of e-commerce penetration happen in the matter of a few months and we’re witnessing the rise of major platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Shogun is specifically built for this e-commerce landscape, tightly integrating into these platforms and their ecosystems of app partners. Shogun has also largely grown organically and employs the capital efficient, product-led-growth model that we’ve come to deeply appreciate at Accel, given our investments in companies like 1Password, Atlassian, Dropbox, Miro, Slack and many others. 

We’ve also had the privilege to partner with the two leading broader low-code-no-code website design platforms in Squarespace and Webflow, and in Shogun, we immediately recognized the parallels of Page Builder democratizing website design for e-commerce merchants. Merchants are marketers at heart and Page Builder empowers them to tell authentic brand and visually compelling product stories without needing to know how to code.

Our investments in Vercel and Strapi, two leaders in JAMstack and headless, also helped us appreciate what Shogun has built in their Frontend product. Slow site speed is the number one pain point for merchants. A one second delay in page load can decrease conversion by as much as 7% (yes, all of us who can’t wait a few seconds for a page to load!). The major e-Commerce platforms weren’t built for site speed and as such, merchants are looking to go headless and decouple their frontend stack from their backend e-commerce platform. Frontend is the first fully-productized JAMstack website platform to market, that provides the design control of Page Builder and sub-second page loads for a native-app like experience in the browser. 

It’s also rare to find founders who are as authentic and passionate about solving their customers' problems as Finbarr and Nick. Since we first met back in early 2019, and over the course of dozens of zoom calls (and a few socially-distanced hangouts, including a 2-hour hike with face masks that left us huffing and puffing!), we’ve gotten to know Finbarr and Nick for the smart, humble and visionary leaders they are. 

We couldn’t be more excited and honored to partner with them in their mission to help merchants create extraordinary e-commerce experiences. 

Read more about Shogun’s next chapter here and Shogun’s thoughts here.

– Ethan Choi