The seed round was led by Felicis Ventures’ Sundeep Peechu and IA Ventures’ Jesse Beyroutey

Buffalo, NY, Nov 16th, 2020 — As COVID-19 continues to accelerate the need for digital operations, the e-commerce and sales management company KYKLO is announcing a $8.5 million seed round to continue to bring electrical and automation businesses online. Led by Felicis and IA Ventures, with support from strategic angels, including the founders of Hybris, Shippo, former Magento SVP Growth and the participation of other institutional investors including Jungle Ventures, Wavemaker partners and Seedplus, the round brings KYKLO’s total funding to $10.2 million.

KYKLO’s SEO-optimized, e-commerce platform digitizes operations and manages content and webstore work quickly and efficiently, so that wholesale distributors can focus on their core strengths — building customer relationships and growing sales, without having to invest in technical webstore setups. KYKLO’s catalog has over 2.5M SKUs, and it has 35+ distributors as customers. Leading manufacturers such as Schneider Electric, Wago, Festo US and Mitsubishi Electric Automation have endorsed KYKLO as a preferred ecommerce provider for their channel partners, and KYKLO is a key strategic partner of the Association for High Technology Distribution (AHTD), one of the largest automation associations.

“With 80% of the $640 billion electrical, industrial and automation distribution industry still relying on PDF catalogs and phone and emails for its operations, distributors face a challenge in the market,” said Sundeep Peechu, Managing Director and founding member at Felicis. “KYKLO’s platform helps these companies keep pace with crucial industry needs and reassess how digital tools can transform their sales force.”

“Having spent my whole career in the manufacturing and industrial space, I experienced the pain points of this pen and paper industry first hand,” said Rémi Ducrocq, KYKLO’s Co-founder and CEO. “I started KYKLO because I felt compelled to bring these industries online. Digital technology is here to transform not only how technical buyers select and buy, but also how distributors' salesforce sell more effectively, especially in a post-covid era.”

IEC Supply, a specialty electrical, automation and controls distribution company, is an early customer of KYKLO. Since partnering with KYKLO, IEC Supply’s online sales jumped over 500% within the first 6 months of implementation. In addition to online sales growth, IEC Supply also accelerated new customer acquisition, generating three times the amount of new customer interactions per month.

“The KYKLO platform gives us a chance to compete with large chain wholesalers in the digital space without a massive marketing or web development budget,” said Matt Zielinski, VP of Sales at IEC Supply.. “The KYKLO Webstore puts our products on the first page of Google and allows my team to efficiently use their time to solve technical challenges.”

Progressive manufacturers believe KYKLO is the perfect tool for their technically focused distributors channel. Mark Snyder, North American Channel Manager for industry leader Festo said, “It’s impossible to say which vertical segment is responding/switching to eCommerce more vibrantly than others, but the general user market across all sectors is definitely switching faster. The big National Distributors are focusing on this in a major way. In my mind KYKLO provides the tools for the small and medium sized distributors to level the playing field.”

The funding will be used to expand KYKLO’s U.S. footprint, including investment in sales and customer success, while also scaling its tech team in Bangkok. KYKLO will ultimately build the largest universal product catalog in the industry and will continue platform development and ensure it remains on the leading edge by enhancing functionality to support distributors' contractor and industrial customers.

About KYKLO

KYKLO is an e-commerce platform that enables electrical, industrial and automation distributors to digitize their operations. KYKLO operates as a one stop online solution with an SEO optimized “plug and play” web-store with best in class product content, including descriptions, pictures and relevant data, customizable with logos and widgets. Headquartered in Buffalo, New York and Bangkok, Thailand, the technology startup is working to transform offline businesses and bring them online by offering distributors the tools they need for customers to quickly and easily find their products. For more information, please visit https://www.kyklo-usa.com.

About Felicis Ventures

Founded in 2006, Felicis Ventures is a venture capital firm that has backed 31 companies valued at $1B or more. Felicis invests in iconic companies reinventing core markets (Opendoor, Flexport), as well as those creating frontier technologies (Ginkgo Bioworks, Recursion Pharmaceuticals). More than 80 Felicis portfolio companies have been acquired or gone public, including Adyen (IPO), Guardant Health (IPO), Fitbit (IPO), Shopify (IPO), Meraki (acquired by Cisco), Twitch (acquired by Amazon) and Ring (acquired by Amazon). To learn more, please visit www.felicis.com.

About IA Ventures

IA Ventures is a seed stage venture capital firm investing in software businesses ahead of product-market fit. We are a tight-knit, all-partner team in New York that works directly with founders every step of the way. Since its founding in 2010, IA has been a seed investor in more than 100 category-defining companies including Datadog, The Trade Desk, TransferWise, Flatiron Health, Better Mortgage, Komodo Health, DataRobot, DigitalOcean, Ironclad, and Recorded Future.

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