Today is a big day for Violet.  We're excited to announce that we've closed a $10M Series A led by Klarna, with participation from Sugar Capital, Lachy Groom, and Red Sea Ventures, who led our $3M seed round just 3 months ago.

We're on a mission to create a more open, distributed, and collaborative version of ecommerce, where shoppers can buy products directly inside social, livestream, sms, voice, AR, VR, or any other experience developers and app companies decide to build. And we unlock that vision with a single API that allows apps to connect directly to a brand or retailer's ecommerce backend without the need for expensive and complex integrations. Our universal commerce API enables any app to launch its own integrated checkout, connected to its own network of merchants.

Building innovative commerce applications has traditionally required building bespoke, individual integrations into a multitude of ecommerce platforms. The cost and difficulty of those integrations has been an existential threat to companies and a barrier to innovation. With our headless API, any application can leverage seamless connections to merchant systems on 10+ ecommerce platforms, and we're adding more every month. These connections support synced product data, dynamic checkout, and what we're calling Order Writeback, enabling each in-app purchase to be no different than a purchase directly on a merchant’s website.

These recent funding rounds will support our efforts to decrease the barrier of entry for innovative ecommerce apps and initiatives to get to market, scale quickly, and achieve escape velocity, without massive amounts of capital. And we hope to be a leverage point that helps create a new series of unicorns in next-gen commerce; the likes of which haven’t even been started yet.

Just as Plaid solved banking integrations and Twillio solved carrier integrations, Violet is solving ecommerce integrations for ecommerce 3.0. by simplifying the merchant integration infrastructure for apps and creators. The possibilities are endless.

We are also extremely excited to welcome Klarna as an investor. Their vision for making commerce easier and smoother for all parties makes them a natural fit. And their scale is truly impressive with over 250,000 retail partners, including H&M, IKEA, Expedia Group, Samsung, ASOS, Peloton, Abercrombie & Fitch, Nike and AliExpress.

“Violet’s solution for ecommerce is going to level the playing field for smaller retailers while also bringing huge benefits to Klarna’s global retail partners. This is more important now than ever following the challenging time many small businesses have had recently. We need to do more to support SMB’s not only in their recovery but in securing a long term future for some of the world’s most innovative businesses. We envisage Violet being a key driver in bringing a huge diversity of retailers to consumers, wherever and however they want to shop.”

-Klarna's CEO and Co-Founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski‍

In the near term, we'll use the recent investment to scale our growth, product, and engineering teams (check out our open roles), as we continue to invest in its focus on being a mission critical ecommerce infrastructure company.

About Klarna‍

We make shopping smooth. With Klarna consumers can buy now and pay later, so they can get what they love today. Klarna’s offering to consumers and retailers include payments, social shopping, and personal finances. Over 250,000 retail partners, including H&M, IKEA, Expedia Group, Samsung, ASOS, Peloton, Abercrombie & Fitch, Nike and AliExpress have enabled Klarna’s innovative shopping experience online and in-store. Klarna is one of the most highly valued private fintechs globally with a valuation of $45.6 billion. Klarna was founded in 2005, has over 4,000 employees and is active in 17 countries. For more information, visit klarna.com.