The Australia-based vendor is adding U.S. locations and executives as it gathers steam for an IPO.

Fresh off a $50 million investment in late 2014, e-commerce platform technology provider Bigcommerce has added key executives and expanded its geographic footprint in the U.S. The Australia-based company is marshaling forces for an initial public offering of stock, which could come in the near future, says Eddie Machaalani, Bigcommerce co-founder and CEO.

“We are venture capital-backed, so at one stage or another they’ll need a return,” Machaalani says. “The goal for now is building a business that will endure. An IPO is a logical next step.” That stock offering, he says, could come in two years.

For now, Bigcommerce is expanding.

Bigcommerce opened a San Francisco office in March 2014 and since then has added tech personnel. In January the company moved into larger offices to accommodate an engineering team that has increased by more than 60% in less than a year. The provider says it plans to fill an additional 100 positions in the first half of 2015.

Since late 2014, Bigcommerce has added three top executives. Tim Schulz, who is chief product officer, came from Google Inc. where he was head of business development and partnerships, leading teams that launched Google Wallet, Google Express and International Product Listing Ads, Bigcommerce says. Prior to Google, Schulz was head of product at e-commerce platform provider Magento, now part of eBay Inc. Since joining Bigcommerce, Schulz has launched product initiatives including enterprise analytics, mobile point of sale technology, and expanded integrations with systems from Alibaba, Avalara, Google, Lightspeed POS and Pinterest, according to Bigcommerce.

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Schulz will oversee Bigcommerce’s software-as-a-service e-commerce platform, expanding it to accommodate enterprise-level businesses and providing more flexibility to its existing customers in over 100 countries, the company says.

Bigcommerce earlier this month announced two other key appointments:

Ron Pragides is now senior vice president of engineering. He has been charged with building a global engineering team across offices in Sydney, San Francisco, and Austin, Texas. He previously served as director of engineering at Twitter and senior director of engineering at Salesforce.com, helping both companies through their respective IPOs.

Melanie Kalemba has been named senior vice president of sales and strategic business development. Formerly CEO of Movero Technology, Kalemba has negotiated global partner deals during the past year including American Express, Braintree, Endicia, Intuit, NCR and PayPal, as well as led the company’s focus on the enterprise market.

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These appointments followed a $50 million Series D investment round led by Softbank Capital, the U.S. arm of Japan-based Softbank Group, an investor in such e-commerce, Internet and telecom companies as Alibaba Group, Yahoo Japan and Sprint. Other investors are American Express and Telstra Corp. Ltd., Australia’s largest telephone service provider.

Bigcommerce, which launched in 2009, primarily serves retailers doing $10 million to $20 million in sales annually. About 75% of its clients are retail chains or stores looking to build or grow online sales. The Bigcommerce sales mantra is “start small” with an e-commerce platform and scale up as business grows, Machaalani says. “There’s this notion that retailers are either on a small platform or an enterprise platform. We want to break that notion. We love small businesses and don’t want to see these companies have to replatform,” he says.

Bigcommerce has five e-commerce platform clients in the Internet Retailer Top 1000.

 

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