While e-commerce penetration continues to rapidly grow, the ways in which consumers and brands interact is shifting dramatically. We’re seeing a new wave of commerce driven by influencer content — consumers increasingly look to influencers and creators for product curation. At the same time, many brands that relied on targeted ads for customer acquisition are navigating a new (and harsh) reality with Apple privacy changes dramatically changing ad effectiveness and quality. There’s an opportunity for new products to bring consumers and brands together and facilitate purchases at the point of consumer inspiration.
Founded less than a year ago, we are excited to share our investment in FERMÀT today which lives at the intersection of these trends and will usher in a new wave of distributed commerce. FERMÀT officially launches today to brands on Shopify to help them partner with and sell directly through influencer content. We at Greylock are thrilled to lead the $12M seed round with QED Investors and partner with the FERMÀT team as they build an important company.
FERMÀT provides the tooling and the network to enable distributed commerce. The company enables brands to embed shopping experiences in influencer content, so the influencer’s audience has a native, engaging shopping experience. Brands can manage the full workflow in FERMÀT’s system – from partner (influencer) discovery, to licensing custom products based on the partner to creating unique payout structures per partner. And with FERMÀT, there is a 100% closed loop attribution on each partner’s impressions and sales. For influencers, FERMÀT offers access to no-code tools so they can build an immersive, native shopping experience with brand collaborators directly in their content. Since soft launching earlier this year, FERMÀT is powering consumer transactions across tens of brands and hundreds of creators and excited to rapidly scale that with today’s public launch.
FERMÀT’s co-founders Rishabh Jain (CEO) and Shreyas Kumar (CTO) are exceptionally well positioned to help brands navigate this new reality. Rishabh and Shreyas worked together at LiveRamp which they helped build into a leading ad tech company — Rishabh built multiple new businesses from scratch to scaling revenues at LiveRamp, and Shreyas was a key engineering leader, most recently leading the platform engineering group.
We are thrilled to back this team and to add FERMÀT to a select set of commerce companies Greylock has partnered with over the years – including Builder, Curated, Inventa, Postscript, and TellApart. If you’re interested in building the future of commerce, please consider joining the FERMÀT team, they are hiring!
