Cymbio raises $20M to help ecommerce brands manage marketplaces with automation

Cymbio, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup providing a marketplace automation platform, today announced that it raised $20 million in series B financing led by Corner Ventures with participation from Udi Angel, Vertex Ventures, and Yuval Tal and other individual angel investors. The round brings the company’s total raised to $30 million at a “nine-figures” valuation, which CEO Roy Avidor says will be put toward launching new and enhancing existing products.

The pandemic has accelerated ecommerce growth, and, in particular, the growth of marketplaces. In 2021, online sales are expected to account for 18.1% of retail revenues worldwide. The need for efficiency in inventory, manufacturing, and logistics orchestration brought brands and retailers to “dropship” solutions, which offload fulfillment to third-party companies. But retailers that sell across multiple solutions and marketplaces can run into problems connecting, operationally supporting, and managing those channels — especially in light of supply chain woes.

Avidor, Mor Lavi, and Gilad Zirkel cofounded Cymbio in 2015 in an effort to address these ecommerce challenges. Avidor was a senior advisor to Israel’s minister of industry trade and labor. Lavi, a serial entrepreneur, was most recently CEO at social media analytics company Virgo, and Zirkel led business development at search engine startup Delver.

“Cymbio’s low-code integration platform, combined with the company’s product content automation capabilities, enable brands to reduce the ‘go live’ time with marketplaces and retailers, enable fast scaling — eliminating long and cumbersome processes such as long manual integration, product upload, imagery adjustments, taxonomy, and mapping,” Avidor told VentureBeat via email. “[We’re] eager to create a connected commerce world, where every brand can connect and collaborate with any retailer, marketplace and vendor.”

Connecting retail channels

Cymbio’s platform integrates with brands’ and retailers’ systems, leveraging automation to handle setup, onboarding, and management of product data, imagery, inventory, orders, and more. Cymbio claims to enable things like real-time, cross-platform inventory and order updates by replacing manual tasks with preconfigured rules.

Cymbio customers get a product catalog showing their products, product images, and product details relevant to their market partners. Information and pricing are automatically updated, and the data is reformatted to meet a retailer’s requirements. All retailers can be managed from a single hub, including marketplaces, department stores, and boutiques. And inventory is updated in real time and sent based on each retailer’s formats and desired frequencies.

Cymbio also automates return, shipping, and cancelation processes. For example, it can create acceptance roles for orders or trigger refunds and notifications when returns are initiated by customers on marketplaces.

“Once connected with Cymbio, the process of making a commercial decision from starting a partnership with a retailer or marketplace is immediate and doesn’t require the brand’s IT team time,” Avidor said. “[T]he challenges brands are facing in the new era of digital commerce … led [me and the other founders to our] mission to efficiently connect, scale, and automate the full cycle of digital retail operations for every brand, enabling advanced and consistent digital sales growth.”

Cymbio has a rival in Channeladvisor. But to date, the 42-employee startup says that it’s signed on over 400 brands as customers, including New Balance, Steve Madden, and Camper, and it plans to triple in size by the end of 2022.