Shopify Invests in Sanity: Connecting Commerce with Content (ssr)

Written by Magnus Hillestad

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Content is the essential ingredient powering the exceptional experiences brands must create to attract and retain their customers. Shoppers crave authentic connections with the companies they buy from. They need to be inspired.

This is why we’re excited to share today that we've entered into a strategic partnership with Shopify, and that Shopify has made a significant investment in Sanity. Together, we are making the integrations between our headless offerings seamless, creating an unparalleled opportunity for brands wanting to create exceptional experiences. This is a validation of how far our technology has come and how strategically important content is for the future of e-commerce. We are the first and only investment Shopify has made in a content platform.

How we got here

Shopify is the largest and most successful e-commerce platform on the planet. For more than 15 years they have set the bar for helping merchants create beautiful, seamless buying experiences. Millions of businesses across 175 countries use Shopify to power their online e-commerce experience. Combined, these businesses sold $175.4 billion on Shopify’s platform in 2021, up 47% from 2020.

Our partnership with Shopify started last year, when they asked us to create the content application for a new developer ecosystem they were building. As followers and fans of Shopify for many years, we had been curious about how they would approach the ongoing evolution of web technologies. As we learned more about the initiative, we became increasingly eager to support them as we saw they were closely aligned with our own vision for the future.

Last week, Shopify unveiled that ecosystem and launched their new Hydrogen framework and Oxygen platform, which was built to harness technology advances in headless development and deployment speed. At the same time, we launched our new Shopify integration as the first and only CMS integration on the Hydrogen app store.

What can you expect from us

While the investment amount is undisclosed, becoming part of Shopify’s portfolio significantly bolsters Sanity’s balance sheet and gives us years of runway to continue developing our product and building our business. Having barely started using the funds from our Series B fundraising in 2021, we were already well capitalized. This new funding helps us continue to think bigger.

Today, Sanity’s community is nearly 200,000 people strong. Thousands of businesses and more than 100 large enterprises use the Sanity platform to support critical digital experience infrastructure. Category-leading companies such as AT&T, Unilever, Burger King, the New York Times, Spotify, and Morning Brew rely on Sanity to power experiences for their customers.

We deliver a horizontal platform for structured content that works for a multitude of use cases, industries, and customer types. Three common areas are e-commerce, marketing, and media. This partnership strengthens our position in e-commerce. At the same time our commitment to media companies and digitally native companies that use Sanity for content across web, product, and mobile apps is unchanged.

With this new funding, we will keep to the path we laid out last year, continuing to build out our product and release major platform updates such as our recent Sanity Studio V3. We will continue to teach the market about the power of Structured Content, which began with our first conference in May. We will make Sanity more accessible and easier to understand for more customers. And we will continue to build our organization. Having grown from 40 people when we announced our Series B to more than 100 today, we continue to grow in a strong sustainable way, accelerating innovation in digital experience and content management.

It’s been a privilege to support Shopify in this effort and a major milestone for Sanity. Together, we’re bridging a critical gap between content and commerce and enabling merchants to build deeper relationships with their customers.

And we’re only just getting started.

Find out more about how Sanity + Shopify can help you create remarkable experiences.