Live Story raises €2.7M
Plans to become the go-to CMS for business users in the digital experience economy
Live Story, the no-code visual CMS designed for marketers and content teams, has raised €2.7 million in seed funding, led by Vertis, one of Italy’s most prominent early-growth venture capital firms. The investment will power international expansion, AI-driven product development, and hiring, as the company sets its sights on exceeding €10 million in ARR by 2027.
Founded by Stefano Mocellini, Live Story offers an innovative alternative to traditional CMS platforms by enabling content owners — not developers — to take full control of digital experience creation.
“What truly sets us apart is our business-first philosophy,” said Mocellini in an exclusive interview with MoveTheNeedle.news. “While others build for developers, we build for business users, marketers, content teams, ecommerce managers — giving them a tool designed to make their everyday work faster, easier, and more impactful.”
From Silicon Valley to Milan: Live Story’s origin and evolution
Live Story was founded in 2016 in the U.S. with a mission to turn content into commerce. Since then, it has evolved into a fully-fledged visual CMS — a “headless experience builder” that enables teams to create branded digital content and campaigns without writing code.
“We’ve built Live Story for business users, the people who plan campaigns, manage content, and own KPIs,” Mocellini said. “Our mission is to make their work easier, faster, and more impactful.”
Where traditional CMS platforms often separate content from commerce and rely heavily on engineering support, Live Story puts creative control in the hands of marketers. With drag-and-drop functionality, modular design, and full compatibility across monolithic and composable stacks, the platform empowers teams to launch landing pages, collections, or hubs in hours instead of weeks.
“Traditional CMSs make even small changes feel like heavy lifts. The result is slower launches, disconnected user journeys, and missed opportunities to convert,” Mocellini noted.
Built for speed, scale, and performance
Today, over 100 brands use Live Story to deliver high-performing, branded digital experiences — including fashion and luxury leaders like Valentino, Dolce & Gabbana, Max Mara, Bottega Veneta, and Illy. The platform is known for blending editorial richness with business logic, making it a strategic asset for ecommerce teams and digital marketers.
Live Story is now expanding beyond its stronghold in fashion, lifestyle, and retail into finance, insurance, and pharma — verticals that increasingly rely on engaging digital journeys and seamless personalization.
“Modern businesses rely on digital experiences to connect, engage, and convert,” said Mocellini. “But the challenge is doing it quickly, beautifully, and consistently across channels. Live Story is built for this.”
Vertis backs a new class of CMS challenger
The €2.7M round was led by Vertis SGR, an Italian VC firm known for investing in high-growth innovation companies. Vertis has backed multiple digital-native startups with strong potential to scale internationally. Their investment in Live Story underscores the growing demand for composable, conversion-driven CMS platforms — especially those tailored to business users rather than developers.
With this funding, Live Story will focus on:
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Product innovation: integrating generative and predictive AI features to enhance personalization and real-time conversion rate optimization (CRO).
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International expansion: with a focus on the UK and Nordics, following strong momentum in Italy and across Europe.
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Team growth: hiring across product, engineering, and customer success to meet global demand.
“With the power of AI, we’re building tools that help users not only create faster but also optimize their content for conversion,” Mocellini said. “Our goal is to make it easy for business users to improve CRO in real time so that results are not just measurable, but immediate.”
Building the future of content-driven business
Live Story’s platform reflects a larger shift in digital marketing: from developer-led site management to business-led experience design. The rise of visual-first content, multichannel commerce, and AI-powered personalization makes the need for flexible, fast, no-code CMS solutions more urgent than ever.
“In 3 to 5 years, we want Live Story to be the reference point for brands that believe in the power of content to drive business,” Mocellini said. “We’re building a platform where business users move fast, create freely, and connect content to performance without friction.”
As digital-first teams across industries seek to reduce time-to-market, boost CRO, and keep creative control, Live Story is well positioned to grow into a European — and potentially global — CMS challenger.