Mirakl

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Founders: Philippe Corrot & Adrien Nussenbaum
Founding: 2012
Mission: We help businesses scale through the platform economy
Employees: 750 & 25% Local
Workplace: Flexible
Stage & Capital Raised: Series E & $948M raised
Investors: Silver Lake Partners, Permira, Bain Capital, 83North, Elaia Partners, Felix Capital
Key Customers: ABB, Accor, Airbus, Carrefour, Express, J.Crew, Leroy Merlin, Macy’s, The Kroger Co and Toyota Material Handling
Glassdoor Rating: 4.2
Valuation (estimated): Last reported valuation “exceeds $3.5 billion“
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Mirakl is the “SaaS solution chosen by leading enterprises worldwide to manage their third-party marketplace and dropship business”. A late stage startup, Mirakl is dually headquartered between Paris and Somerville. This company generates some serious scale so buckle up as we take you on a journey from Paris to Boston to the internet.

Mirakl was founded in 2012 by current Co-CEOs Philippe Corrot & Adrien Nussenbaum. Philippe & Adrien were eCommerce entrepreneurs who sold their video game marketplace  SplitGames to Fnac, the French book and electronics retailer, a couple years after raising a Series A. There, they incubated the marketplace platform they had begun building at SplitGames. This thing worked. “It was a miracle”, Adrien told Philippe at a cafe. With the insight to build an industry-agnostic marketplace platform, the entrepreneurs eventually concluded their work at Fnac and set off on a much larger journey with proven learnings.

In the simplest of explanations, Mirakl is an “out of the box” 3rd party SaaS marketplace platform. They solve the scale issue that businesses face when competing with vertically integrated giants like Amazon or Walmart. In a world of scarce resources, these companies are faced with the classic decision when scoping out their own third-party marketplaces: build or buy?

For the partners that choose to build they often find that this marketplace thing is pretty hard. It takes certain specialties, experience, and attention to get it right. So why not hire experts? Mirakl is finely tuned to spin up 3rd party marketplaces for consumer and B2B businesses that can become huge revenue drivers on top of their core direct businesses. Today, over 350+ organizations use Mirakl-powered marketplaces, including leading retailers Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Kroger, J.Crew and Madewell.

And they didn’t stop at retail. Today they run B2B marketplaces for industrial giants like Airbus, Toyota Material Handling, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and others in order to help serve the second largest sector of our economy: manufacturing.

Mirakl expanded to the U.S. after raising its Series B in 2015, setting up a dual HQ in Cambridge to pair with Paris. The cheese to its wine, if you will. The Mirakl Founders specifically picked Boston as their U.S. HQ for a few reasons. They wanted a location with an east coast time zone, a great quality of life with reasonable operating costs & quiet neighborhoods, and they wanted to be in a global innovation center or “hub”. So why not The Hub?

The flagship Mirakl Platform is ready to be rolled out quickly. They help handle product listings, seller onboarding, billing & invoicing, quality control, specialized workflows, and various pricing & quoting tools.

But while they started in marketplaces, in the quarters ahead they’re working tirelessly to ramp up a suite of frontier products that go much further, enhancing the value of the overall platform. 

Connect onboards sellers onto the Mirakl platform so that they can sell through multiple marketplaces, and links marketplace operators with partners to help accelerate growth. Payout attracts top sellers to your marketplace with simple onboarding and secure payouts. Target2Sell ensures new products are discoverable and curated to end customers across first-party and third-party offers, driven by AI personalization. Catalog Manager helps retailers and B2B businesses reduce the manual effort of dealing with supplier catalogs, doing the integration on their behalf. Mirakl Ads helps monetize your premium eCommerce audience by creating a retail media solution to help drive a new, profitable revenue stream. All to help produce a more seamless onboarding, ramp, and profitable experience for their eCommerce clients.

Mirakl is still growing rapidly after a banner 2022 year. They notched $135M in ARR off of $6B in GMV through the platform across 400+ clients and were named one of Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech. Their co-founders even published a book that landed on Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list. *I do not receive any compensation for shilling this parchment!*

Operators to Know (Locally):

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Mirakl team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • Could you share some details about the onboarding process & training? What is the day to day relationship between the Somerville and Paris HQ?
  • What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team to 1,000 employees?
  • What are the most important product lines beyond the core marketplace product?
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023 // teams that will be seeing the most significant investments?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Mirakl you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more enterprise marketplaces to the Internet. All consumers applaud your efforts. See you around Somerville!

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