Gierd Inc., a Sandpoint-based tech startup that helps companies scale e-commerce sales on leading marketplace platforms such as Amazon.com and eBay, has raised $8 million in series A funding, says CEO Jordan Sielaff.  

Sielaff says the infusion of funds is helping the company scale by hiring more software engineers and product leaders to speed up the company’s product development. 

“We were bootstrapped before the series A; our whole focus was building businesses,” Sielaff says. “We’re fueling growth to scale our business up. Our objective is to just continue to grow and eventually scale the business so we can go public.”

Gierd is poised to make $20 million in annual recurring revenue this year, with $1 billion in gross merchandise value, Sielaff says. Gross merchandise value, or GMV, measures the total goods sold on a platform over a period of time before other deductions, such as fees and returns, are factored in. 

Jon Pederson, chief product officer, says the series A funding will fuel the company’s ability to help ecommerce brands scale efficiently. 

“This investment validates our vision and fuels our ability to help ecommerce brands scale efficiently in an increasingly complex marketplace environment,” he says.

Tom Simpson, president of the Spokane Angel Alliance and co-founder of former Spokane-based e-commerce platform Green Cupboards, contends Gierd’s suite of tools is revolutionizing the e-commerce space by removing barriers to e-commerce expansion. 

“They’re doing the next level of ecommerce (sales),” says Simpson, whose Green Cupboards startup was later renamed etailz Inc. and ultimately acquired for $75 million by TransWorld Entertainment Corp., of New York. 

The Series A financing round was led by New York-based fintech investment group Nyca Partners, with participation from Seattle-based venture capital firm Fortson VC, and Spokane-based angel investment fund Kick-Start. 

Gierd was founded in 2022 by Sielaff and Pederson, e-commerce veterans with experience at Amazon and eBay. The company has 80 staff and has three offices in Idaho, with the others in Post Falls and Boise. The company’s headquarters are at 120 Lake, in the Old Power House building near Sandpoint's docks. 

Gierd’s suite of tools has been integrated into several marketplace platforms, including Walmart, Inc. The company is currently building an integration system for the Chinese e-commerce company Temu, a tradename for PDD Holdings. Lowes Companies, Inc. and Best Buy Co., Inc., are launching marketplaces this year, offering Gierd further opportunities for growth, he says.  

Sielaff says he and Pederson’s shared experience makes them well-versed in the pain points within the e-commerce space, which need a layer of retail and sales orchestration that exists within brick-and-mortar retail stores but has been missing within the e-commerce space. 

Sales orchestration is the coordination and streamlining of sales processes and teamwork focused on a positive shopping experience, which leads to improved sales outcomes. 

For example, businesses that sell products to their local grocery store are only responsible for shipping their products to the grocery store, Sielaff says. The grocery store then takes care of all the aspects of sales management, including vendor managers, customer support, and logistics support. The support infrastructure is built into retail, which manages the entire transaction, he says.  

“When you put your product directly on eBay or Amazon, you’re really just securing a billboard spot,” Sielaff says. “When a customer comes to the shelf, there needs to be somebody who’s supporting that sale, and so Gierd is on the back end of each of those items that are listed across that channel.”

Gierd’s integrated tools also include demand forecasting, fraud protection, risk-reducing performance management, intelligent pricing, and unified sales reconciliation. 

Among Gierd’s most sought-after tools is the company’s pricing engine, Sielaff says. Gierd’s pricing tool ingests competitor data, which allows brands to act and make quick decisions on repricing to compete with competitors, he says. The pricing tool is tied to reconciliation, which forecasts the financial impact of price changes in real time. 

“It’s a super powerful tool, and we’ve made an immense amount of investment to scale this tool and make it able to support pretty much any category,” he says. 

Sielaff says there is a considerable amount of costs associated with these types of systems that allow a business to scale and grow. The eyewear company Warby Parker Inc., Apple Inc., and Nike Inc. are all examples of companies that have built out their own retail infrastructure for themselves. Even those large brands, however, realize they need to be able to sell their products on other marketplaces, he says. 

Sielaff says Gierd is focused on solving pain points for two customers, the brands they work with, and marketplaces. 

“Many brands actually don’t scale on marketplaces on their own without this type of investment and support,” he says. “And our whole objective is to reduce the barrier so that brands can be successful.”