Spryker is a leading composable commerce platform for enterprises with sophisticated business models for enabling growth, innovation, and differentiation. Designed for sophisticated transactional business, Spryker’s headless and API-first model offers an approach that provides businesses the flexibility to adapt, scale, and quickly go to market while facilitating faster time-to-value during their digital transformations. To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Boris Lokschin, Co-founder and CEO at Spryker.
Boris Lokschin’s Background
Boris Lokschin has been building enterprise commerce technology for over 2 decades. And before launching Spryker in 2014, Lokschin founded, scaled, and sold the e-commerce technology company Symmetrics to CGI Inc. while working as CEO and co-founder.
As part of CGI’s global management, Lokschin was leading an international team that enabled over 150 enterprise e-commerce projects.
“I’m convinced by the vast potential of composable commerce technology to enable companies to build sophisticated transactional capabilities which will benefit whole industries,” said Lokschin in an interview.
How The Idea For Spryker Came Together
Lokschin told me that the team was working on the second wave of the digital commerce industry and saw that the business agility, speed, and composability that would be needed to succeed in the future were not available with the monoliths available at the time.
“We also increasingly started to see industries and businesses outside of B2C retail building transactional capabilities and it became clear that none of the leading digital commerce platforms of the time were designed for enterprise B2B use cases such as Enterprise Marketplaces, IoT Commerce or B2B Commerce for Business Buyers,” Lokschin added.
Challenges Faced Building The Company
When I asked Lokschin about some of the challenges that the company has faced, he cited hyper-scaling including international expansion as the company has a globally distributed team across 50+ countries.
Core Products
Lokschin told me that the company’s core products include Spryker Cloud Commerce OS – which is fully composable and API-first, enabling enterprises with sophisticated use cases to create commerce solutions that help them drive growth. The platform supports a range of business models including B2B, B2C, Enterprise Marketplaces, Unified Commerce, and IoT Commerce.
And through Spryker’s App Composition Platform, enterprises can facilitate initial integrations in one click, enabling them to test the value of apps and services on their business quickly.
Spryker’s headless architecture ensures a future-proof set-up, enabling transactional possibilities with every current and future touchpoint. All of this is delivered via a PaaS+ service, offering all of the associated benefits of cloud computing.
Evolution Of Spryker’s Technology
When I asked Lokschin about how Spryker’s technology has evolved over time, he noted that the focus has always been on customers and how to enable them to grow, shift, and scale.
“Since the initial launch of Spryker’s first composable commerce operating system, we have expanded our offerings to include elements such as the Spryker App Composition Platform, which allows customers to try out 3rd party services with their online business in the most seamless, secure, and curated way,” Lokschin explained. “We’ve also expanded our Spryker Software Development Kit (SDK) Suite, a complete toolkit that simplifies and accelerates developers’ ability to build or upgrade modules for the Spryker platform. With many organizations worried about the escalating costs of maintenance and upgrading installations, the SDK will streamline processes and increase code quality and productivity.”
Biggest Company Milestones
I asked Lokschin about the biggest company milestones. And he noted that in 2014, he founded Spryker with Alex Graf.
“Our first customer, Siroop, worked with us on a progressive marketplace project, which helped us to better understand the market, its needs, and our strengths. Two years later, our first composable operating system was made available. By 2021, we had established a strong partner network, grown the team significantly, and received industry recognition from Gartner,” Lokschin told me. “Most recently, we rolled out our App Composition Platform, which enables a new approach to composable commerce for enterprises that cuts integration time, reduces costs, and helps businesses to adapt and differentiate in a more agile way.”
Customer Success Story
Upon asking Lokschin about a customer success story, he cited Sourceability.
“One of the best things an enterprise can do from a digital commerce perspective is to invest in their own B2B marketplace. We helped global electronics distributor Sourceability do just that. They wanted to become the ‘Amazon for the component trading industry’ and together we created Sourcengine.com,” Lokschin commented. “The marketplace now features more than half a billion products covering almost the entire global electronic components market. It includes a user-friendly online platform that connects global buyers with thousands of merchants, including Sourceability itself. Its innovations around customer ordering, delivery, and seamless buying have completely changed the market.”
Funding/Revenue
Spryker has raised over $160 million in funding from investors like TCV, Maverick, OnePeak, and ProjectA. And the company is currently processing over $16 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) worldwide. Plus the company is addressing a Service Available Market (SAM) of about 7 billion globally.
Differentiation From The Competition
I asked Lokschin about how Spryker differentiates itself from the competition and he noted that achieving business goals requires more than just technology.
“We support our customers with a best-in-class partner ecosystem, Composable Value services, and expert and business consulting to ensure their business goals and outcomes are achieved. Our customers and partners let us know that it’s our stringent focus on customer business objectives that sets us apart,” Lokschin answered.
Future Company Goals
Spryker is on a mission to ensure digital differentiation by providing a platform designed for sophisticated transactional businesses.
“Over the next years, we will continue to focus on enabling sophisticated digital innovation to be the global leader for next-generation enterprise commerce,” Lokschin reflected.
