Despite e-commerce’s recent slump with two straight quarters of decreased funding, in 2014 and 2015 e-commerce welcomed numerous new unicorn companies (including Coupang, Snapdeal, Wish, Houzz, and FarFetch) and notable IPOs such as those of Etsy, Shopify, and Wayfair.
With this in mind, we rounded up the most active investors in e-commerce in one infographic and ranked them by investments into unique e-commerce companies since 2014.
We define e-commerce as including companies using websites or mobile apps to sell physical goods, as well as enablement companies that build these sites and apps. We excluded companies focused on services, such as Uber, or those delivering food and groceries (see our food delivery category for trends there).
The most active investors in the space since 2014 were 500 Startups, Accel Partners, and East Ventures:
- 500 Startups placed first, with investments in nearly 30 e-commerce companies since 2014. We see wide variety in their portfolio, including bets on kids’ clothing (Applecrumby & Fish and Totspot) and beauty/cosmetics (Favful, Althea, Scentbird). Significant recent bets were made in Malaysia and Indonesia-based companies. Only roughly one-fifth of 500 Startups’ companies in the graphic are US-based.
- Accel Partners placed second. They’ve backed some of e-commerce’s most well-funded startups including Jet.com, Etsy, and India-based Flipkart. Etsy’s 2015 IPO which remains New York’s largest VC-backed tech exit since 2011. Jet.com ($725M raised) and Flipkart ($3.2B raised) are both currently unicorns.
- East Ventures, an early-stage-focused fund with offices in Jakarta, Tokyo, and San Francisco, ranked third. Its portfolio includes a unicorn in Mercari.
Several startups show up multiple times throughout our most active investors’ portfolios, including BloomThat, Jet.com, Casper, Soldsie, Birchbox, and Cotopaxi. A few, such as Hollar, ThirdLove, Scentbird, FabFitFun, Lola, and Allbirds were previously highlighted on our early-stage e-commerce startups to watch list.
Our list is dominated by VCs but also includes hedge fund Tiger Global.
Check out the rest of the rankings and their recent portfolio investments in the graphic below.
Click image to enlarge.
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