NJ Serial Entrepreneur, Wharton Grad Marc Lore Snags $55 Million to Build E-Commerce Platform Jet

Esther Surden
Publisher & Editor, NJTechWeekly.com

Marc Lore has raised $55 million for a new e-commerce platform called Jet. |Source: Quidsi website

Whenever New Jersey entrepreneurs want to point to a local success story, they mention Quidsi — the parent company of Diapers.com and several other e-commerce sites — founded in Montclair and sold to Amazon.com in 2010 for $550 million.

Now one of Quidsi’s founders, Marc Lore, has raised money for a new e-commerce startup, Jet. And the amount of money he has raised is not small.

“I’m happy to confirm,” Lore wrote on his blog “that we’ve raised a $55M Series A round of funding led by NEA [Menlo Park] with participation from Accel Partners [Silicon Valley], Bain Capital Ventures [Boston, New York and Palo Alto] and MentorTech Ventures [Philadelphia] . Lore is a Wharton graduate and MentorTech invests only in ventures having a Penn connection. It had also invested early in Quidsi.

 The raise took place as soon as Lore was out from under a noncompete agreement with Amazon, sources say.

 Lore said in the blog that it’s too early to discuss the details of the business he is building. He did say, however, “e-commerce has come a long way in just two decades, altering our expectations around price, selection and service."

"We now expect the lowest prices, infinite selection and overnight delivery right to our doorstep. This transformation in customer experience is undeniable and, at the same time, I believe there is still a massive opportunity for innovation.”

Lore added that Jet will “make use of the latest advancements in technology to create a new shopping experience that will empower customers like never before. Jet will bring unprecedented transparency and efficiencies to the overall e-commerce market, and as a result, will transform the customer experience in a way that, until now, has not been possible.”

An article in Fortune says Lore is building the company alongside two Quidsi cofounders, former VP of special operations Nathan Faust and former project director Mike Hanrahan. Lore’s former cofounder Vinit Bharara, whose January 2014 talk NJTechWeekly.com covered here, is not involved in this project, sources say.

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Business Insider says Jet will operate out of Hoboken and already employs 30 people.

Recode.net’s Jason Del Rey, who broke the news July 29, 2014, says the deal values Jet at more than $100 million. The startup had been self-funded until this point and is expected to officially launch in 2015.




Esther Surden is Publisher and Editor of NJTechWeekly, and a contributor to Philly Tech News. This article (with some small additions) originally appeared in NJTechWeekly, and is republished here with her permission.

Penn-founded Yodle files for IPO to raise about $75 million

Tom Paine

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Local business advertising website Yodle filed today for an IPO to raise about $75 million in an initial public offering (IPO). It plans to list its shares under the ticker symbol "YO" (yes, true).

Founded in 2005 and originally named "NatPal", its founders included Penn grads Nathaniel Stevens and Ben Rubinstein. A 2007 Knowledge@Wharton article describes how the venture got off the ground, with the help of the Wharton Venture Initiation Program and a Wharton professor.

Now based in New York, Yodle reported a 30 percent jump in revenue to $45.7 million for the three months ended March 31, and a loss of $5.9 million. Competitors include Yelp, Angie's List and others. Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Bessemer Venture Partners and Jafco Technology Partners. Penn-related MentorTech Ventures is also an investor.

Monetate's new CFO David Stetson

Tom Paine

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David Stetson

Conshohocken-based Monetate's newly appointed Chief Financial Officer, David Stetson, received an MBA from Wharton, but he is not, as he told me in a phone interview, a native of the Philadelphia area. Rather, he says he is an "eighth generation Vermonter." In fact, his most recent position, for three years, was as CFO of Vermont-based Dealer.com, which is similar to Monetate in that it is not a brand name that most consumers see, but provides auto dealers with the tools needed to run their websites and manage inventory and customer relationship management (CRM). Privately-held Dealer.com, which the Burlington Free Press calls "everybody’s favorite poster child for Vermont’s new digital economy," is a sizable operation, with some 700 employees and anticipated 2013 revenue in excess of $200 milion, according to its CEO. It has receive venture backing from prestigious VCs including a reported $30 million from Accel Partners in 2011. Dealer.com says it has 7,000 dealers as customers in the US out of some 18,000 dealers nationwide.

Stetson's responsibilities as Monetate's new CFO include finance, human resources and operations. Operations, he tells me, includes building the administrative and enterprise systems needed to manage Montetate's rapid growth. Stetson says just as the company is committed to using cloud technologies in developing its products and serving its customers (for example, Monetate delivers its product as a SaasS offering and uses Salesforce.com as its CRM), he is comitted to using the Cloud for Monetate's enterprise systems. It is currently implementing a cloud-based Human Resources Management System (he won't name the vendor right now) as it seeks to manage headcount growth from its current 155 to a projected 230 or so by year end, and will be looking next at Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, which help manage and integrate several functions across the business. While SAP is probably a bit of overkill for a company of that size (though SAP might argue otherwise), Stetson did say Monetate will consider Tier II vendors such as NetSuite, Infor, and Microsoft Dynamics which may be better suited to Monetate's current scale.

Monetate's specialty is in "personalizing" an end user's experience when visiting a website. Once a snippet of code is added to the website of a Monetate customer, the company says, non-technical marketing people can then make the enhancements to websites to achieve the desired functionality without further coder intervention. Monetate's software also enables rapid prototyping and A/B testing. Although until recently Monetate has been focused almost completely on retailers, it is now seeking to expand into markets such as consumer products, travel and financial services.

Most of Stetson's career prior to Dealer.com was spent as a tech investment banker, including a stint as Head of Equity Capital Markets for Lehman Brothers' Global Technology Group. So he certainly has the needed experience in terms of understanding financial markets and raising equity. A company with Monetate's growth potential must be considered a possible future IPO candidate, although I doubt that it would be ready for that step for some time. And of course, its always possible that a major ecommerce player or Amazon competitor (think eBay, Google, perhaps Facebook) could look at it as an acquisition candidate. But Stetson emphasized he joined Monetate not for any anticipated exit, but rather for the journey, and the chance to work with co-founder and CEO David Brussin and a very talented team. "Nobody at Monetate is working here for a paycheck," he said, but rather for the opportunity to build something special.

Stetson says he hopes to have slightly better digs than what he had while attending Wharton, and will probably relocate his family somewhere out in the western suburbs. His favorite participatory sports are Freeskiing (a bit more difficult to do in southeastern Pennsylvania than in Vermont) and golf.

Moentate also announced last month the addition of John Healy as chief operating officer, along with Stetson. Healy came from GSI Commerce. Neither position existed previously, but were added to help manage Monetate's growth. The company said in an SEC filing in late February that it had raised another $15.2 million in venture capital. Its last big raise was $15 million in 2011, led by OpenView Venture Partners. First Round Capital was a seed investor, and Josh Kopelman is on Monetate's board. The company said it more than doubled revenue, customers and employees in 2012.



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Daily Links 12/2/2010: GSA choses Google, Unisys for hosted email

First Hands-On Impressions of Verizon 4G: It’s Fast! (Gigaom)

Clearwire Plans to Sell at Least $1.1 Billion of Debt (Bloomberg)

Motorola Buys Connected Home And Energy Management Software Developer 4Home (TechCrunch)

Motorola eyes home streaming to mobile (Reuters)

Liberty Exits IAC For Evite, Gifts.com And $220M In Cash – Diller Steps Down As CEO (TechCrunch)

US agency chooses Google for hosted e-mail (Computerworld)
The actual contract was awarded to Unisys, which is partnering with Google and others. Although not that large, it is considered an important strategic win for Google.

SAP's HANA goes into ramp up, Accenture partners on Business ByDesign (ZDNet Blogs)

FCC's New Net Neutrality Plan: Has Anything Changed? (PC Magazine)

Cable's $5B Biz Services Bonanza (Light Reading Cable)

Comcast eliminates cable HQ in Montco (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Time Warner digital guru says Netflix will have to raise its prices (VentureBeat)

Wharton MBA conference theme: mobile revolution (Philadelphia Business Journal: Technology Blog)

For Newspapers, the Future Is Now: Digital Must Be First (Gigaom)
On CEO John Paton of the Journal Register group.

Calling All Wall Streeters: NYC’s Got A New FinTech Incubator (Wall Street Journal: Venture Capital Dispatch)
Might be of interest to some of the many Philly-area FinTech people.




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