Commercetools was founded in 2006 by Dirk Hoerig and Denis Werner in Munich. Hoerig had spent years in the e-commerce space and saw that traditional monolithic platforms couldn’t keep up with the pace of change brands needed. He built commercetools around the idea that commerce should be an API, not an application.
The platform is built on MACH principles — Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. In fact, commercetools helped define the MACH Alliance, a consortium of enterprise software vendors advocating this architecture. Every capability is exposed through APIs: product catalogs, pricing, carts, orders, payments, and customer management.
In 2021 commercetools raised $150 million in Series C funding at a valuation exceeding $1.9 billion, led by Accel and DTCP. The company counts Audi, AT&T, Danone, and John Lewis among its enterprise customers.
Commercetools Composable Commerce lets businesses pick exactly the components they need and integrate them with best-of-breed tools for search, CMS, payments, and everything else. The platform processes billions of API calls monthly across multiple cloud regions.
The company introduced Foundry in 2024, a suite of pre-built commerce components that cut implementation time for common scenarios. This was a response to criticism that headless commerce takes too long to launch. Commercetools employs over 600 people with offices in Munich, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and Durham, NC.
