Nautical Commerce

They Needed a Team That Could Start in a Week. We Did.

Nautical Commerce was a marketplace platform-as-a-service backed by a $30M Series A from Drive Capital, with Accomplice and Golden Ventures also on the cap table. Founded in New York in 2020 by Niklas Halusa, the platform enabled ecommerce companies to launch multi-vendor marketplaces in 90 days instead of the two or more years it typically takes to build from scratch.

The CTO needed a team. Not a proposal with a three-week discovery phase and a kickoff date six weeks out. A team that could evaluate, onboard, and start building within days.

We had seven engineers available. The engagement started within a week of the initial discussion and vetting.

What We Did

Nautical had a one-year-old codebase. Functional, but not enterprise-grade. We picked it up and extended it over multiple years.

Platform Extension

The work was not greenfield. It was the harder kind: inheriting a year of someone else’s engineering decisions, understanding the architecture, and building on top of it without breaking what already worked.

We added the major functional pieces that every marketplace platform needs: payment processor integrations, multi-language translations, custom fee structures, tax calculation across jurisdictions, and multi-currency support. These sound like features. They are actually engineering problems that require drawing on the whiteboard before writing a single line of code, because timezone logic, tax rules, and currency conversion interact in ways that are easy to get wrong and expensive to fix.

Frontend Rebuild

We rebuilt the frontend for better UI component performance, faster rendering, and cleaner usability. The frontend engineers on our team were full-stack developers, which meant they understood the Django backend and the React frontend as a single system, not two separate codebases that happen to talk to each other. From our experience, full-stack frontend engineers build better frontends because they understand what the API is actually doing.

Enterprise Readiness

We debugged and diagnosed the platform, resolved stability issues, and hardened it for enterprise clients. This included SOC 2 compliance readiness, which is table stakes for any SaaS platform selling to enterprise buyers. Enterprise clients do not evaluate your features first. They evaluate your security posture, and if that fails, they never see the features.

The 90-Day Launch

The platform’s core value proposition was that new marketplace operators could go live in 90 days using Nautical, compared to two or more years building custom marketplace infrastructure. We built the tooling and integration pieces that made this timeline possible. On Nautical’s side, a dedicated integration specialist guided each client through the launch process. The engineering we did gave that specialist something that actually worked within the 90-day window.

How We Worked

This was not a typical outsourcing engagement. Nautical’s internal team did not treat us as vendors. We were their engineering team.

We flew to New York for product and technical discovery sessions. Core members of both teams sat in the same room, outlined the roadmap, and then executed it together over the following months and years. There was no separate communication channel for “the external team.” There was one team, one Slack, one Jira, one codebase.

This is the engagement model that works for venture-backed companies scaling fast: the internal team owns the product direction and the core architecture. The external team provides senior engineering capacity that integrates seamlessly. No handoff documents. No status reports for status reports. Just engineers building alongside engineers.

It was one of the best engagements in our history, specifically because of this dynamic. When the client treats you as internal, you ship like internal.

The Stack

Python and Django on the backend. React on the frontend. PostgreSQL for the database. UI component libraries for design consistency. CI/CD pipelines with two separate customer environments. We did not influence the stack. It was already well-chosen when we arrived.

The Team

Seven EltexSoft engineers at full capacity:

Three backend developers working in Python and Django.

Three frontend developers, all full-stack capable, working in React with deep understanding of the Django API layer.

One QA engineer.

The engagement ran multiple years, covering the period of heaviest platform development and client acquisition.

The Outcome

200K+ monthly transactions processed across Nautical-powered marketplaces. Multiple enterprise clients onboarded during our engagement. SOC 2 compliance readiness achieved.

Nautical Commerce’s assets were later acquired by Traide, which continues to operate the marketplace platform. Acquisitions validate the engineering: buyers perform technical due diligence, and a platform that passes that diligence is worth acquiring. One that doesn’t, isn’t.

Who We Are

EltexSoft is a boutique software engineering studio. 35-50 senior engineers. Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal. Engineering team in Ukraine. Founded in 2015.

Nautical Commerce is one of our deepest B2B ecommerce references. We also build for FinTech, FoodTech, HealthTech, and travel. Our tech stacks include Laravel, Django, React, Vue, iOS, and Android.

5.0 Clutch rating across 30+ verified reviews. 200+ five-star Upwork reviews. Top Rated Plus and Expert-Vetted agency status (top 1%). Average client engagement: 3+ years.

30-minute technical call. Bring your marketplace architecture challenge, your platform scaling problem, or your ecommerce product idea. We’ll tell you what we’d build and what we wouldn’t.

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