Our clients go beyond traditional ecommerce by selling across all channels, collaborating with channel partners and expanding product assortment.
To offer you a glimpse of our future vision, let's quote the IPO Founder's Letter, from Mariano Gomide and Geraldo Thomaz, our co-CEOs:
"In the future, we envision being at the center of a vast network that natively connects every part of the global digital commerce ecosystem. We see VTEX as the single control panel to manage all aspects of brands and retailers’ sales life-cycle, from engaging to selling and fulfilling. We are committed to creating a future-proof platform that makes collaboration scalable, allowing every organization to focus its talent on what makes it unique.
No matter what happens, one thing is certain: the future is about talent. We have taken it upon ourselves to create an abundance of diverse talent for our company and our ecosystem. We invest heavily in historically under-served yet high potential regions, co-creating centers of academic excellence to develop world-class, global-citizen digital workers. We foster the emerging market leaders who will build the next generation of disruptive technologies and global businesses. Education is our instrument for social impact.
We are here for the long run. We would like to invite future-driven investors to join us on this exciting journey as we build long-lasting foundations for the digital transformation of commerce. Our invitation goes beyond our organization’s (very much virtual) walls. It speaks to the size of the opportunity of digitalization in the emerging world: value creation is increasingly geographically distributed. We are witnessing a wave of emerging technology companies hungry for the opportunity to create prosperity in their respective regions. We know there is a transformative future ahead, and we are here to accelerate it."
Geraldo Thomaz Jr. & Mariano Gomide de Faria, 2021
Unlike other startups, we chose to develop our business in a sustainable way, with financial health, reinvesting our money in our own development, without over-leveraging. After years of developing our business, the South African group Naspers, invested around R$ 7 million in VTEX in 2012. We worked with this amount until 2019.
At the end of 2019, Softbank, Gávea Investimentos and Constellation Asset Management, together, injected R$580 million into VTEX. Besides the global expansion, the investment was used for research and development (R&D) of new features, which made our platform even more relevant to the market.
In 2020, Tiger Global and Lone Pine Capital invested US$ 1.25 billion in a Series D round of financing, which led us to reach a market value of US$ 1.7 billion. Tiger and Lone Pine are private equity stars and have invested in companies such as Snap, Uber, Wise, Facebook, Xiaomi, Squarespace, Alibaba, Airbnb, Mercado Livre, Coinbase, Roblox and UI Path.
In July 2021, we took another step toward our future and went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), trading under the symbol "VTEX". We are now one of the few Latin American technology companies that have a global impact and are listed on the stock exchange.
What does it mean to be a global commerce platform? It means we work to enable companies to quickly and securely explore new ways to engage consumers, sell products, and fulfill orders.
Whether our clients want to create an online store, integrate and manage orders across all their customer service channels or become an online retailer, we enable them to be whatever they want to be, in the best way they can be, through our platform.
We were able to achieve this because our platform is equipped with several flexible features that allow our clients to create the experiences their customers want. We are the facilitators of these digital relationships.
Besides fully understanding the needs of businesses and retailers, the VTEX platform is built on clear principles that allow our clients and partners to build new features into the existing platform.
To this end, we have an API-first, multi-tenant, microservices-based architecture, which ensures that our platform is homogeneous for all clients.
In practice, this means that whenever we release a new feature or whenever a partner creates a new integration, this update is automatically shared with all our clients so that they can also go further.
In addition, we have built VTEX IO, a serverless development platform that allows companies and partners to create new proprietary technologies.
The principle of VTEX IO is that any commerce capability works like an app. Any client or partner can quickly create a custom application or, with the click of a button, install an app created by the ecosystem.
This generates one of our major triumphs: the future-proof cycle.
Our solutions combine agile implementation with flexibility, allowing us to serve, with a single platform, clients who operate in completely different regions, business models, industries, and audiences. With this, we create value for two major audiences: B2B and B2C.
The architecture we have developed is key to offering peace of mind to our clients so that they can handle, for instance, a Black Friday, when over 2000 stores worldwide process more than 1 million orders in less than 24 hours. We are talking about X million requests per minute.
From the beginning, we believed that every future-oriented software-as-a-service company should be built on collaboration at scale. The era of standalone software is over. With that, growing alone was not enough for us: we needed to grow as a collaborative, networked platform.
Thus, our ecosystem became stronger, and we gradually included:
As our network grows and our ecosystem expands, we are able to incorporate new features that offer even more benefits to our clients and partners. In other words, we make sure that clients and partners have access to talent, at scale.
And, contrary to what it may seem, this network goes far beyond the virtual. A great example of this is VTEX Day: the annual meeting of all participants who make up this ecosystem, the largest ecommerce event in Latin America, and a key element of our competitive differentiation.
The strong and broad network of partnerships we have built in the last decade is incredibly difficult to replicate, and this is one of the elements that sustain our position as leaders in Latin America.
Another important aspect of our escalating growth and cultural construction is our commitment to two themes that are pillars of our identity: education and diversity. The future of technology depends on an abundance of talent. When faced with scarcity, we take it upon ourselves to develop talent not only for ourselves, but for the entire ecosystem.
We also invest heavily in education through our internship programs. With the VTEX Internship Program for Software Engineers e do VTEX Internship Program for Product Designers, interns have the opportunity to undergo a very hands-on technical learning experience, in which they can work for a few months on a special project, such as optimizing an internal process or improving the buying and selling experience of thousands of people.
The goal is that, from the very first day, the intern understands that their work here is very important.
We also developed TETRIX, a challenge focused especially on college students and recent graduates, which aims to develop their business and entrepreneurship skills through a gamified competition. The winner is invited to participate in an immersive trip to several places around the world to learn about innovative initiatives in the ecommerce industry, and they also get the opportunity to participate in training and mentoring sessions.
For professionals who want to enter the world of development, we have created Hiring Coders, a free training program that has no prerequisites. The course is developed for all those interested in developing a future-proof career, with a focus on full-stack and ecommerce development. To do so, the program offers mentoring sessions with VTEX's experts, besides allowing the participants to have contact with our community and connect with professionals from the market and the technology industry.
Last but not least is the Digital Commerce Specialist Program (DCS), a trainee program focused on preparing graduates and newcomers for the labor market. The aim is to help them develop in the context of the digital industry, combining learning and work experiences, and preparing them for whatever path they decide to follow within the digital commerce industry.
We still have a lot to grow and to contribute to an increasingly diverse professional ecosystem. But one thing doesn't change: our belief that the future of digital commerce will be built through education and diversity.
At VTEX, diversity goes beyond representation: it’s a vital part of what makes us authentic. People from diverse social backgrounds are able to propose unpredictable solutions. It sparkles innovation. We are challenged everyday by the variety of perspectives that arise in a diverse environment.
For us, diversity is not just a struggle for representatives of underrepresented groups, but it is a commitment made by everyone.
A diverse environment means being open to this capacity for innovation through diverse proposals, visualizing new ways of building the future to which we are committed.
COMPANY
A diverse environment means being open to this capacity for innovation through diverse proposals, visualizing new ways of building the future to which we are committed.
INDIVIDUAL
Inclusion promotes a collaborative environment that encourages our talents to exercise their full potential, being players of transformation at VTEX.
SOCIETY
We burst our results, contributing to the development of the community.
When companies grow they usually become more complex. When unaware, that complexity can kill the company from the inside. It collapses in culture, in the way conversations happen, in bureaucracy, in reducing talent density, in getting out of the insurgency, and becoming an incumbent.
We are not choosing that future. We are different. Being different allows us to choose paths that others think are impossible. We are here to build a great company, avoid complexity and bureaucracy, maintain high talent density and exceptional quality of conversations. This is a company worth building.
When we discuss culture, we are discussing the foundations and behaviors that will lead us to that amazing company worth building. We are high-performing teams and individuals, and we are building the culture that will always allow us to stay this way.
Now, what is culture? For us, culture is the sum of our daily conversations. The conversations we choose to have and the ones we choose not to have, build our behaviors and results. People say that quality communication is critical to creating strong and lasting relationships, and the same goes for corporations. Powerful conversations create powerful teams.
In order to maintain the quality of conversations we discovered some fundamental traits
It’s hard to maintain these fundamentals in every conversation. So, when something is out of place, we are all agents of transformation, clearing up our conversations, building a common future, questioning, discussing, and positioning ourselves.
The quality of conversations we have here, you won't find it anywhere else.
