Moovweb, a mobile commerce site and app builder founded in 2009, has raised $16.7 million in its first institutional funding round. The round was led by Jafco Ventures and Trinity Ventures and included Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. The 77-employee vendor’s clients include 1-800-Flowers.com Inc., Bare Necessities, Bloomingdales, Chico’s FAS Inc., eBags Inc., Golfsmith International Holdings Inc., Macy’s Inc., The Men’s Wearhouse Inc., Redbox Automated Retail LLC, TicketWeb and Under Armour Inc.

Joe Horowitz and Paul Sallaberry of Jafco Ventures have joined Moovweb’s board of directors. Gus Tai of Trinity Ventures has been named a board observer.

“We are using the funds from this latest round to expand sales, marketing and the product team into more verticals, new territories and new market opportunities,” says Mitch Bishop, chief marketing officer. “Moovweb already powers mobile sites for customers like John Deere and Accenture that target global markets. We’re now going to be putting local resources on the ground in Europe to support that market.”

This was Moovweb’s first institutional round of funding. The vendor had an angel round of funding in 2009 that raised $700,000. That round was led by Bechtolsheim.

Moovweb’s web-hosted technology takes an existing e-commerce site and transforms it into an m-commerce site or app, or both. “The advantage to retailers is that they can leverage all of the existing features, content and business logic of their desktop site to go mobile in weeks, not months,” Bishop says.

A retailer downloads the Moovweb software development kit, or SDK, and installs it on an in-house server. The retailer uses the SDK to make a copy of its e-commerce site. This copy is fully functional, having inherited 100% of the e-commerce site’s features, functions, content and business logic. Front-end developers then use the SDK and Moovweb’s front-end language called Tritium to create the transformation instructions for the m-commerce version of the site. Once completed, the Tritium version is pushed to Moovweb’s web-hosted infrastructure, where the desktop site is synced with the mobile site or app.