Oh boy
In the meantime, Popup raised $3.5 million in a pre-seed round. Holmes and Grassi had started a dropshipping company, Viceroy Group, together and had bootstrapped that into an eight-figure company before starting Popup, so this isn’t their first foray into venture capital.
Ex Shopify folks who think Shopify is broken
Corey Holmes and Matteo Grassi started Popup in 2021 after watching merchants selling through marketplaces (e.g., Shopify and BigCommerce) use the homepage and few product pages given, but then have to hack together a half-dozen more tools to build out everything from customer relationship management to email marketing tools. Holmes told TechCrunch that these are often tools that don’t easily integrate with the main e-commerce platform without needing some custom coding.