Australia-based e-commerce platform Bigcommerce today announced raising $50 million (USD) in Series D funding.

The company will use the funds to invest in product development, grow sales and marketing, and expand its business to new markets.

The financing was led by SoftBank Capital, a venture firm affiliated with SoftBank Corp., and included Telstra Ventures and American Express, as well as existing investors General Catalyst and Revolution Growth.

Steve Murray, a partner at SoftBank Capital, will join the Bigcommerce board. “Bigcommerce’s easy-to-use, cloud-based platform allows businesses of all sizes to rapidly build and deploy full-service e-commerce and m-commerce tools to grow revenues,” said Murray. “We are thrilled to partner with Eddie (Bigcommerce Co-founder) and this outstanding leadership team as the business achieves scale and accelerates its growth both in the US and internationally,” he added.

E-commerce as a segment of the total retail market is growing at 30 per cent per year and is expected to reach US$2 trillion in sales worldwide in 2015, according to a Bigcommerce research. The company has seen significant year-over-year revenue growth and is approaching US$5 billion in total online sales across merchants, shared an official release.

Credit cards investing in eCommerce

“American Express is committed to helping small merchants, and our investment in Bigcommerce is one of the many ways we are working to equip these businesses with resources that can enable them to grow,” said Tyler Vaughey, Vice President, US Small Merchants, American Express.

Bigcommerce recently added new features to the platform, including Bigcommerce Analytics, an enterprise-grade real-time reporting tool; the Single Click App Store, an easy way for merchants to integrate their store with the other software they use to run their business; one-click payments setup, where merchants can set up popular payment options like PayPal and Stripe; and a new theme store, further stated the release.

“Partnering with SoftBank Capital gives us access to the growing Asian market and opportunities within SoftBank Group companies, including Alibaba, while American Express and Telstra share our passion for helping businesses in the US and Australia respectively,” said Eddie Machaalani, Co-founder and CEO, Bigcommerce.

“With this new round of funding, we will continue to level the commerce playing field so that every merchant has the opportunity to build a compelling brand and scalable business to effectively compete with the largest players in their industry,” he concluded.