Stitch Labs Raises $3.5 Million As It Makes Plans To Address Inventory Management For Larger Business

Stitch Labs, the startup founded in 2011 to help small and medium-sized businesses manage their sales operations, has raised $3.5 million in Series A financing. Founder Brandon Levey said that Stitch Labs’ business has outgrown what its platform can handle, and they will be releasing a new product in January to serve larger scale businesses that they currently cannot accommodate.

Greg Sands of Costanoa Ventures led the round, with participation from True Ventures and Greg Waldorf, the founding investor in eHarmony. In February 2012, Stitch Labs raised a seed round of $1 million led by True Ventures.

Last we reported, Stitch Labs had been working to become the one business platform to rule them all by integrating with companies that provide specific services. That includes the cloud accounting software provider Xero; sales sites like Etsy, Shopify, and BigCommerce; shipping providers ShipStation and Amazon.com; and Verifone’s Sail for payments.

Levey explained that Stitch Labs isn’t aiming to be the best shopping cart or POS system or warehouse manager. There are others who can do that better. What they can be is the best engine to bring together all those disparate elements of running a business.

The launch of an expanded platform in January will now enable Stitch Labs to reach businesses that do $5-20 million in revenue each year. As it stands, the platform can readily serve those customers who are doing half a million to $5 million a year, along with those in the $100,000 range.

Stitch Labs is not moving on to larger businesses beyond SMBs, Levey explained, but rather expanding its capability to provide services on the larger end of the SMB spectrum.

“In terms of our platform, if a company is doing more than 10,000 orders a month we have to turn them away right now,” Levey said. “Our total order volume has grown over 20x in the last year. [Order processing] was at one million per month in the last year alone. We have to accommodate those doing 30,000 a month, or those doing 5,000 a month and in November and December they do 30,000 a month.”

While Stitch Labs does have a number of competitors in that space, like BrightPearl, TradeGecko, Unleashed, and Lettuce, Levey said the company differentiates itself on its real-time integrations, a focus on design, and analytics reports,

On that last point, Stitch Labs is at work on developing forecasting reports in addition to its current roster of analytics reports, all of which focus on past sales data.

It’s a service that many of Stitch Labs’ users would not necessarily think to ask for, Levey said, because they are so tied up with the daily work of running their business. But once introduced to the idea of analytics that project into the future, it’s a no-brainer.

“I want Stitch to be the brains behind the operations,” Levey said. “I want us to be the things that link all of these sales channels. Holistic commerce, that’s where we can play… When I think of features around that, it’s all about sales channel intelligence and automation. In building out key inventory and operational features, it’s the ability to manage multiple warehouses on a mobile phone.”