CommentSold receives investment from Permira

CommentSold, a cloud-based SaaS platform that enables live and social selling across multiple shopping platforms and channels, including social media networks, merchants’ own websites and their CommentSold-powered branded mobiles app, has received an investment from Permira. Permira is a global private equity firm which scales tech-enabled businesses. CommentSold will use the investment to accelerate it next phase of business growth. CEO Brandon Kruse, who has spearheaded CommentSold’s expansion over the past four years, will continue to lead the company along with the existing management team. ZMC, a prior investor, will exit the company.

CommentSold helps retailers optimize business functions such as invoicing, merchandising, inventory management, fulfillment, and marketing, enabling them to offer a range of payment options, recommend products, send push notifications, prerecord videos for product demonstrations, and offer replays of previously recorded livestreams to shoppers on demand. The company currently provides more than 6000 independent sellers and small-to-medium businesses with the end-to-end technology, tools, and educational support they need to simplify and integrate their retail operations. In the trailing twelve months, CommentSold generated over 1 billion dollars in gross merchandise value (GMV) and shoppers viewed more than 1 billion minutes of content on the platform. Today, the company has over 12 million registered users.

“Partnering with Permira is the perfect way to kick off our next phase of growth and stay on the leading edge of live selling by ensuring our platform provides everything our customers need to engage shoppers and grow their businesses,” said Kruse in a statement. “We’re very proud of what we’ve built so far and we’re confident that the Permira team’s knowledge and expertise in scaling consumer tech businesses will help us unlock our full potential and seize the huge market opportunity in front of us. This investment is a major validation of live selling, our platform and our team, and we’re very excited for what’s ahead.”

CommentSold is part of the live-selling market, which is helping democratize e-commerce in line with growing consumption of live media. The market has benefitted significantly from the rise of the internet and mobile adoption via social media platforms, creating a more interactive shopping experience for consumers. Live selling is wildly popular in China, but is an underpenetrated market in the U.S., presenting CommentSold with significant growth opportunities in both its core platform offering and additional product and geographical expansion.