Exclusive: e-comm platform Canal notches $22.5 million Series A

Less than six months after making its initial splash, e-comm platform Canal has notched a new round of funding, raising a $22.5 million Series A.

• The $$ will let Canal build out its team of engineers, along with staffing up in sales, marketing, and operations to help meet growing demand.

The startup, which links “like-minded” companies to sell each other’s stuff—“We’re not the shelf or the products you put on the shelf, we are your access to inventory,” Bennett Carroccio, Canal’s CEO and co-founder, previously explained—has already brought about 165 brands onto its platform.

• Olipop and Andie Swim, for two, are part of Canal’s curated network. Carroccio told Retail Brew it has 1,000+ brands on the waitlist (which averages about two weeks) to join.
• Carroccio said Canal’s platform makes up more than 50% of online orders for a few of its onboarded brands.

“[We’re] helping them just to be able to sell to a consumer that didn’t know them already,” Carroccio said. “They’re finding consumers elsewhere on the internet, and really expanding their scope of who they could sell to.”

What’s next? Canal’s introduced an app on the Shopify App Store so brands with existing partners can also use its tech. It plans to build on it and expand to other e-comm backends like Magento, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce.

• “Canal’s future is to become platform-agnostic,” Carroccio said.—JS