Ecwid, the only e-commerce solution that lets retailers add an online store to any web platform and to multiple online sites simultaneously, announces it has closed its Series B investment, which will be used to accelerate its rapid growth which has surpassed 500,000 registered merchants worldwide.

The $5 million funding was led by iTech Capital with participation from Runa Capital, which provided Ecwid's Series A funding. Ecwid will utilize the Series B funds to extend its mobile and social commerce product leadership, further expand its global distribution partner network and grow its sales and marketing teams. Ecwid also will help small- to medium-sized (SMB) merchants get online and synchronize their offline and online commerce by tightly integrating e-commerce with their point-of-sale systems.

Ecwid, used by SMB merchants in 175 countries and in 45 languages, stands apart from other e-commerce solutions because it 1) plugs seamlessly into any web presence, 2) enables retailers to add robust e-commerce without limiting their choice of web platform or forcing them to abandon their current website, and 3) lets merchants operate multiple online stores on multiple sites simultaneously from a single control panel. With Ecwid, merchants are not locked into a single website and can easily create stores on any CMS (e.g., WordPress, Joomla, Drupal), sitebuilder (e.g., Yola, Wix, 1&1, Go Daddy), social media or blog.

Ecwid is Facebook's most popular store builder app, with over 300,000 monthly active users. In addition, Ecwid features mobile responsive design, so stores adapt dynamically to any customer device (e.g., smartphone, tablet, game console, smart TV) regardless of screen size.

'Ecwid is popular because it is a true sell-anywhere storefront with universal integration on any online platform. This is a reason it has had stellar growth and profitability with a first round funding of just $1.5 million,' says Gleb Davidyuk, managing partner of iTech Capital. 'Ecwid's market of small business merchants also is where the e-commerce growth of the next decade will be found. There are millions of sites built with Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly and Yola that now can embed a full-featured store in minutes. This is a great business opportunity, a great management team and much potential growth for our shareholders.'

Mr. Davidyuk has now joined the Ecwid, Inc. board of directors.

'Ecwid goes along with the software ecosystem, rather than fights against it, and can be used by merchants without IT support,' comments Dmitry Chikhachev, Runa Capital managing partner. 'Ecwid's architecture also is so advanced and 'light' it pioneered social commerce, a first step in the distributed commerce trend: where multiple, synchronized online and offline storefronts are possible for merchants of any size.'

'My quest to democratize e-commerce started in 2000 when I founded X-Cart, the first PHP e-commerce platform. Online store builders have not changed much since then, using the same 'dedicated e-commerce site' approach,' comments Ruslan Fazlyev, founder and CEO of Ecwid. 'But Ecwid was engineered to be a game changer, making it possible to add a full-featured store to any existing web site, while preserving its design. It is exciting to see this vision come to fruition, and with strong partners like iTech and Runa, we look forward to accelerating our growth and continuing to improve our product.'

'Ecwid began as a way to let merchants sell from any website they prefer, without having to abandon their investment in an existing site or be locked into a dedicated e-commerce website. We used our first funding round to deliver this choice and flexibility to small businesses, and also to bring them rich functionality for mobile and social commerce,' said Jim O'Hara, president of Ecwid. 'This new round of funding allows us to help merchants converge their offline and online sales through our POS and mobile POS integration, so they can sell their products anywhere at any time, offline or online and from any device. We also will extend the rapid growth of our network of site-builder, CMS, hosting and payments partners globally.'

About Ecwid: Ecwid is a full-featured, cloud-based e-commerce platform that allows SMBs to create professional online stores and embed them into any existing web, mobile, or social site in minutes, and operate multiple online stores with point-of-sale integration simultaneously. Ecwid, available directly or through trusted partners, has 500,000 registered merchants in 175 countries, and is available in 45 languages. A free plan is available. The Ecwid Facebook app is the leading shopping cart application on Facebook, used by more than 300,000 monthly active users. For more info, visit http://www.ecwid.com/.

About iTech Capital: iTech Capital is a global Private Equity & Venture Capital firm focused on investments in digital economy companies around the world. Its pioneer fund, iTech Fund I, LP was established in 2011 and is supported by iTech Advisors Limited investment team, which provides advisory and supervisory services over its Russian assets to the Fund. The iTech Fund I, LP portfolio is comprised of equity injections in IT companies operating in Russia, Asia and Europe. The iTech Capital investment team's global expertise fosters long-term capital growth in IT, Web, E-Processing and New Media related projects. For more info, visit http://itcap.ru/.

About Runa Capital: Runa Capital is a $135M venture capital firm established to seek investment opportunities in the rapidly growing areas of the tech sector, with specific focus on cloud computing and other hosted services, virtualization and mobile applications. Partners and fund investors have experience in creating/developing global companies with assets worth more than $10 billion. Runa Capital's investments announced to date include: NGINX, Jelastic, Ecwid, Zopa, Acumatica, Infratel, drchrono, Wallarm and others. For more info, visit www.runacap.com.