General press inquiries
pr@bigcommerce.comTue, 02/10/15, 02:00:00 PM
SAN FRANCISCO — February 10, 2015 — Bigcommerce, the ecommerce platform of choice for fast-growing brands, today announced that former Googler Tim Schulz has been named Chief Product Officer. The company also appointed Ron Pragides to Senior Vice President of Engineering, and Melanie Kalemba to Senior Vice President of Sales and Strategic Business Development. These appointments come on the heels of a banner year of rapid growth for the company which concluded with a $50 million Series D investment round led by Alibaba investor Softbank Capital.
Bigcommerce, which operates a platform providing growing retailers with tools to launch, promote, manage and scale an online store, claims more than 60,000 customers with more than $4 billion in sales processed by its platform. Bigcommerce has recently moved into a larger office on Market Street in San Francisco to accommodate an engineering team that has grown more than 60% and looks to fill nearly 100 positions in the first half of 2015.
“We’re building a stellar team to help us on our mission of democratizing ecommerce for every business in the world,” said Eddie Machaalani, Bigcommerce co-founder and CEO. “Strong company performance begins with strong leadership. This executive team will lead our solid execution of a 2015 product roadmap that includes more functionality and enterprise-grade features for growing ecommerce brands.”
As Chief Product Officer, Schulz will chart the course for Bigcommerce’s SaaS ecommerce platform as it scales to serve enterprise-level businesses and offers more flexibility to its existing customers in over 100 countries. Schulz joined Bigcommerce from Google where he served previously as head of its business development and partnerships, leading teams that launched Google Wallet, Google Express and International Product Listing Ads. Prior to Google, Schulz was head of product at ecommerce platform Magento where he grew the platform to become one of the world’s leading enterprise commerce platforms. Since joining Bigcommerce last year, Schulz has launched multiple product initiatives including enterprise analytics, an open platform for mobile point of sale to enable online/offline commerce, and global partnerships with Alibaba, Intuit, UPS, NCR, Google, Pinterest, Avalara, Endicia and Lightspeed Retail.
With more than 20 years of experience in the technology industry, Pragides will lead Bigcommerce’s engineering teams across its San Francisco, Sydney and Austin locations to create a world-class ecommerce platform. Previously with Twitter and Salesforce.com, Pragides’ leadership and experience building engineering teams at SaaS-based companies will help Bigcommerce’s team and platform grow to better serve large retailers in the enterprise space. Pragides was one of the first employees in its San Francisco office and has since established its engineering team. Through his leadership, Pragides prepared the Bigcommerce platform for the massive increase in sales during the 2014 holiday season, with merchants on the Bigcommerce platform experiencing 100% uptime and over 300% increases in traffic.
As the head of Bigcommerce’s Sales and Strategic Business Development, Kalemba will further extend the company’s partner ecosystem to optimize the merchant experience. Kalemba has negotiated significant partner deals over the past year including Alibaba, American Express, Intuit, UPS, PayPal/Braintree, NCR and Endicia/USPS, as well as led the company’s focus on the emerging enterprise space. Before her work with Bigcommerce, she served as President and CEO of Movero Technology Inc., an enterprise software company serving Fortune 500 companies, where she led two funding events and its acquisition by Broadsource and Integrated Mobile. With previous executive experience at 3M, Cisco and Dell, Kalemba’s knowledge and drive of the ecommerce industry and ecosystem will better serve Bigcommerce’s clients as they grow their businesses. During her time at Cisco, Kalemba established a partnership with AT&T, while managing a team that supported more than 1,000 enterprise customers. She also established Dell's "Laptop for Students" program focused on furthering higher education, resulting in a new student-focused business division in Dell Higher Education.
Since establishing its Bay Area presence in March 2014, Bigcommerce has grown its product and engineering teams to nearly 100 employees with plans to significantly expand headcount in the first six months of 2015. The team is currently hiring software architects and engineers, as well as partner and product managers for its San Francisco office.
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