Akeneo Raises $46 Million to Expand Its Leadership in Product Experience Management

Our new round is led by Summit Partners, a leading U.S. investment firm, and includes participation from our existing investors; Alven, Partech, Salesforce Ventures, and Stephan Dietrich. We are honored to join the Summit Partners’ family of great companies, which include Uber, Philz Coffee, and Webex.

This is great recognition for the entire Akeneo team and the work we have accomplished thus far. A lot has happened since our previous funding round, led by Partech in late 2016. We launched several new products, grew our team to include 180 talented individuals across five countries, established strategic partnerships with Adobe/Magento and Salesforce, and have seen our community undergo enormous growth. With more than 60,000 installations of our Community Edition, we are proud to say that Akeneo, in less than five years, has become the most used PIM platform in the world. But we are only at the beginning of our journey. https://vimeo.com/359519754

With great power comes great responsibility

A funding round is just a means to an end. With all the cash and the support we now have to fuel our growth, we’re committed to continuing to execute on our vision of building the market’s standard for Product Experience Management. To quote Nicolas Dessaigne, CEO of Algolia: “In the end, we will not be judged by how much we raised but by how much we delivered.” So, let’s take this opportunity to see what's coming next for Akeneo.

What lies ahead 

We released many product improvements and new modules during the past three years -- including Reference entities, Onboarder, and Franklin, among others -- and we successfully introduced our Cloud offering in 2017. But there is still a lot more to do:

• Continuously improve Akeneo PIM to remain the most user-friendly and efficient PIM solution available
• Unleash more Product Data Intelligence capabilities to automate product enrichment workflows with AI
• Further develop Akeneo PXM platform capabilities to allow our ecosystem to build and benefit more easily from SaaS-compatible add-ons.

Our primary area of investment with this round will be in our R&D, to continue to innovate and keep pace with our customer and community needs.

Embrace our open source roots

The software industry we are living in needs more transparency and collaboration to reinvent itself. Black boxes and vendor lock-in models are from another time, and should disappear. What makes Akeneo unique is the combination of our best-of-breed enterprise solution and our vibrant open source community. Most open source vendors tend to, at some point in their growth, consider their community offerings as competitors for their enterprise businesses and therefore start slowly killing them. We are -- and will continue to be -- determined and firm believers in the open SaaS model. We believe that our open source edition is our strongest asset and that we need, now more than ever, to keep investing in our ecosystem of partners and developers. There is still a long way to go, but this is an incredible journey, and we are proud to share it with you!

Onward and upward, Akeneo!

Fred de Gombert, CEO and co-founder of Akeneo