App integration startup Button raises $20M Series B led by Norwest Venture Partners, brings total funding to $34M
When you ask Button CEO Mike Jaconi what his company is going to spend a fresh $20 million dollars in funding on, his answer isn't the typical fallback on the overly-generic word “growth.”
Context & Ripple Effects
Button has been building toward this round for two years: after raising $12 million in early 2015 to make the app world as interconnected as the web, the company now adds a $20 million Series B led by Norwest Venture Partners, taking total funding to $34 million. CEO Mike Jaconi frames the spend around something more specific than generic growth — deepening the app-to-app linking layer that lets mobile shoppers move between apps without friction.
Norwest leading the round matters beyond the check size: the firm's sector- and stage-independent strategy means it is betting on mobile-commerce infrastructure rather than a single consumer app, and the bet aged well — by mid-2019 Button raised a $30 million Series C at a reported valuation above $200 million.
First-order effects
- Button gains roughly six times its prior funding base in one step, letting Jaconi's team scale the app-linking product beyond the early partnerships built on the 2015 raise.
- Norwest Venture Partners takes a lead position in mobile-commerce plumbing, adding Button to a portfolio strategy that spans consumer, enterprise, and healthcare stages.
Second-order effects
- Mobile shopping apps and merchants that rely on Button's linking layer get a better-capitalized vendor, while any rival deep-linking or app-attribution startup now faces a competitor with $34 million behind it.
- The round signals to other investors that app-interconnection infrastructure can support successive venture rounds — a path Productiv later followed with its own application-engagement analytics raise.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, value in mobile commerce migrates from the storefront apps themselves to the integration and routing layers between them — the same structure Unit pursued with banking APIs embedded into other companies' products.
- Successive rounds at growing valuations push app-infrastructure startups toward platform economics, where whoever owns the connection between apps captures the transaction data and pricing power.
The trend: Venture capital is steadily funding the invisible integration layers between apps, turning interconnection itself into the investable asset in mobile commerce.