Popup grabs $3.5M for code-free way to personalize online storefronts businessroundups.org

Two former Shopify employees think they’ve cracked the code — via no-code, really — for small ecommerce merchants to move beyond the one-size-fits-all marketplace tools and deliver personalized customer experiences.

Corey Holmes and Matteo Grassi started Popup in 2021 after seeing merchants selling through marketplaces (e.g. Shopify and BigCommerce) using the homepage and some given product pages, but then having to hack half a dozen more tools to build out everything from customer relationship management to email marketing tools . Holmes told businessroundups.org that these are often tools that don’t easily integrate with the main ecommerce platform without custom coding.

While e-commerce has declined somewhat since stores returned to in-person shopping, global retail e-commerce sales reached about $5.2 trillion by 2021 and is expected to grow 56% to just over $8 trillion by 2026. Here’s why Holmes and Grassi say legacy platforms that offer no way to differentiate storefronts or customer experiences to personalize, not meet merchant needs.

Enter Popup, a no-code platform for creating, managing and hosting online stores, from landing pages to ad campaigns to checkout, using a drag-and-drop visual editor.

“There are a lot of traders we’ve worked with, and it opened their eyes to what we can do differently,” Holmes said. “When you look at Popup, we empower you to build any type of online commerce experience you need in seconds. It’s just drag and drop to be able to connect everything based on your business.”

The company’s platform entered beta in September and will be available to the public in the first quarter of 2023. It earns money through a monthly subscription and through processing fees at checkout. As such, Holmes and Grassi said they couldn’t talk about traction except they have 40 employees.

Meanwhile, Popup raised $3.5 million in a pre-seed round. Holmes and Grassi had co-founded a dropshipping company, Viceroy Group, and turned it into an eight-figure company before founding Popup, so this isn’t their first foray into venture capital.

The round was led by Accel and included Seedcamp, 20VC, and a group of angels like ex-Shopify CMO Jeff Weiser and Hopin CEO Johnny Boufarhat. The funding will be used to launch the platform, hire more staff and forge new partnerships.

“We saw a clear value proposition with salespeople who are well versed in marketing, who are trying to grow and who understand that stage of the journey,” Grassi told businessroundups.org. “As we develop, we will be able to move into other industries where we can provide some in-demand features.”