The company has made its first purchase of another company, Magento Integration.
Shopgate, the mobile commerce platform based in Palo Alto and in Germany, has now made its very first acquisition in the form of the purchase of the developer of Magento, MagCorp, which is backed by both Northcap and Creathor Ventures.
Many are deeming this more as an aqui-hire than a complete acquisition of another company.
When this acquisition is complete, it will have the four developers behind MagCorp becoming a part of the existing team of 132 people at Shopgate that provides powerful mobile commerce at its Butzbach campus in Germany. Shopgate makes it possible for merchants to be able to build storefronts that are optimized for viewing and use over mobile devices. This allows those shops to be up and running either through a browser or a native app.
The Shopgate experience claims to beat the competition through enhanced mobile commerce integration.
The integration works with the popular web based ecommerce and shopping card provider APIs, which includes Magento. This means that essentially, it provides a plug and play experience with the majority of the backends that are already being used by most online retailer stores.
The acquisition brings the four people in the MagCorp team – André Kraus, Alexander Wesselburg, Peter Liebig, and Stephan Recknagel. Their platform and experience working with it will join the larger team at Shopgate.
The MagCorp team already has some considerable projects under their belts, including the Birchbox clone from the Samwer brothers, as well as Glossybox. Using the ecommerce element from Magento, they say, has made it possible for the subscription service to be able to handle recurring payments. This team has also worked for Luxodo, a clothing retailer from Germany, as well as the Autoda auto dealership giant, and mysportgroup, the online sporting goods retailer.
Now the Shopgate mobile commerce platform will absorb this expertise and use it to be able to enhance its Magento integration. This will specifically focus on broadening the integration that they already have from the company, as well as to begin to concentrate on “Magento Enterprise”.
