Dive Brief:

• NewStore, a company whose Mobile Retail Platform helps retailers set up mobile-first shopping experiences, has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Activant Capital, along with existing investor General Catalyst and company founder Stephan Schambach, according to a company press release.

• The company has raised a total of $90 million to-date. Prior to founding NewStore, Schambach started Demandware, a company later acquired by Salesforce, and which later became the Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

• The company plans to use the new funds to expand its platform to handle an influx of mobile traffic and orders for brand clients, the company said.

Dive Insight:

Schambach is a big picture thinker. "Mobile is eating retail, which will soon be a $28 trillion market. Ninety percent of shoppers not only carry their smartphones into brick-and-mortar stores, but also use them to support their buying journey," he told Retail Dive in an email. "If a retailer or investor thinks only about the current purchase made on mobile, they are missing the big picture. It’s about mobile influence, not just mobile purchase."

Retailers that look to generate any kind of dollars from mobile in any way possible may be missing the bigger picture. Much of what they are missing has to do with how “shopping has become a streaming activity," as Schambach said in a press release. To him, the process is about "Streaming Retail," meaning customers should be able to create their own mobile shopping experiences with their own tendencies for placing orders, browsing products, checking inventory and writing reviews.

NewStore integrates with a number of e-commerce platforms, including the one he created at Demandware, as well as SAP Hybris, Oracle ATG and Magento. However, as its name suggests, the Mobile Retail Platform is built with mobile devices in mind, with one-touch purchasing, on-demand delivery and customer engagement all optimized for mobile screens. It already is being used to power the adidas Glitch football app, and NewStore is taking the platform directly to retailers through its own sales efforts, rather than relying on bigger partners.

It sounds like the kind of platform that Salesforce and other larger e-commerce platform companies would like to have in-house as e-commerce increasingly morphs into mobile commerce, with a higher percentage of all e-commerce sale coming from mobile. Schambach sold his previous creation, but maybe he wants to keep this one.