Magento Commerce now has an impressive $250 million in new funding from Hillhouse, a Chinese investment firm.
Hillhouse, one of China’s biggest investors, is led by chairman Zhang Lei, an early backer of Chinese Internet giant Tencent. Hillhouse started out 11 years ago with $20 million in funding from the Yale University Endowment.
The cash infusion brings Magento’s valuation to $700 million, according to the Financial Times, citing unnamed sources.
The new money will fund a global expansion of sales and marketing operations—especially in Asia, which Zhang sees as a particularly hot market. It will also bolster customer support, product development, and potential acquisitions, according to a statement from Magento on Wednesday.
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Magento was founded in 2008, and its technology provides the technology underlying many online shopping sites. It was sold to eBay (EBAY) three years after launching. Then, in November 2015—months after the eBay-Paypal separation—eBay agreed to sell what was its enterprise division to Permira, a global investment firm and other investors. That entity was dubbed Magento Commerce.
Magento competes with companies like Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce as well as e-commerce offerings from software giants SAP (SAP), IBM (IBM), and Oracle (ORCL).
Now together, Hillhouse and Permira will hold big stakes in Magento, although Permira funds will retain the majority share.
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Magento chief executive Mark Lavelle said in a statement that the company maintains a large global network of partners including system integrators to support some 250,000 customers. All together, those customers generate more than $50 billion in annual sales.
