Beyond Brand Roll-Ups: Why We Invested in Pantastic, the Shopify App Roll-Up

Brand roll-ups aren’t new, but most have been strictly focused on combining merchants, not software businesses. Thrasio, Perch, and Ellevate Brands are three of the biggest players which have collectively raised over $4B to acquire merchants across platforms. These brands are powered by a wide range of software tools that are highly fragmented, and, in our opinion, ripe for a roll-up.

There are over 7,000 third-party Shopify apps generating approximately $45M of monthly revenue in aggregate… and both these numbers are only growing. While apps like Klayvio have grown into large-scale businesses, the vast majority of these apps are too small to be stand-alone businesses.

We invested in Pantastic to capitalize on this growing opportunity. Pantastic helps merchants scale by offering a consolidated suite of services and technology… by acquiring sub-scale Shopify apps and rolling them together.

Meeting Pantastic

We were lucky to have Will Quist, a co-investor and partner at Slow Ventures, introduce us to Pantastic last year.

From our first call we were immediately impressed with Scott Rafer, the co-founder and CEO. Scott is a serial founder in the e-commerce enablement industry and served as founder/CEO of Mashery (now part of TIBCO), Lookery, MyBlogLog (now part of Yahoo!), Feedster, WiFinder (now part of Boingo), and Lumatic. He also spent time as a director/executive at Nanigans.

Scott’s specific know-how, existing network, and charismatic character made us confident that he could build a transformative business in this space.

Before we invested in Pantastic, the team had already acquired Spently, the first of many app acquisitions. As luck would have it, another one of our founders was selling a previous business and we were able to connect him with Scott. That connection ultimately led to Pantastic’s acquisition of Carthook.

We’re still on the hunt for more Shopify apps that can integrate into the Pantastic universe. A few specific areas of interest include: post transaction emails, on-site search, customer analytics, and shipping/logistics.

Please reach out to Matt Nichols if any opportunities come to mind.

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