Private equity firm Permira has made a “strategic investment” in livestream, social commerce platform provider CommentSold. The company said it will use the financial infusion to accelerate its growth plans.
CommentSold describes itself as a cloud-based SaaS platform “that enables live and social selling across multiple shopping platforms and channels, including social media networks, merchants’ own websites and their CommentSold-powered branded mobile apps, which drive nearly 80 percent of sales.”
Terms of the investment were not disclosed. But in a statement, the company said CommentSold’s chief executive officer Brandon Kruse will continue to lead the company along with the existing management team. Prior investor in CommentSold, ZMC, said it was exiting its position in the company as a part of the deal.
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Andrew Vogel, co-chief investment officer and managing partner at ZMC, praised CommentSold’s “outstanding management team and employees for their partnership during a period characterized by dynamic growth and innovation” while noting that they were excited about CommentSold’s future prospects under Permira.
In the deal, Evercore served as the exclusive financial adviser to CommentSold while Lowenstein Sandler LLP acted as legal adviser. Fried Frank served as legal adviser to Permira.
CommentSold’s platform supports small- and medium- sized businesses, and helps merchants optimize business functions “such as invoicing, merchandising, inventory management, fulfillment and marketing, enabling them to offer a range of payment options, recommend products, send push notifications, prerecord videos for product demonstrations and offer replays of previously recorded livestreams to shoppers on demand, among other capabilities.”
Currently, CommentSold supports over 6,000 independent sellers and SMBs and has more than 12 million registered users. CommentSold said in the trailing 12-month period it generated more than $1 billion in gross merchandise value while shoppers “viewed more than 1 billion minutes of content on the platform.”
Kruse said the investment deal with Permira “is the perfect way to kick off our next phase of growth and stay on the leading edge of live selling by ensuring our platform provides everything our customers need to engage shoppers and grow their businesses.”
David Erlong, principal at Permira, described CommentSold as a “disruptive platform enabling livestream e-commerce and powering massive growth of small businesses in the U.S.” and noted that Kruse and the management team “are redefining how live sellers interact and create lasting relationships with their audiences, which is a critical component for live sellers aspiring to supercharge their growth.”