FERMÀT’s mission is to enable direct commerce inside of content. We believe that by enabling brands to embed shopping inside of influencer content, we can accelerate a future where consumers can shop directly from e-commerce brands while engaging with the content they love.
Today, I’m excited to announce that we’ve raised $12M Series Seed led by Greylock and QED Investors, with participation from Courtside Ventures, and several operators in the industry. Additionally, our product is now open to use for any e-commerce brand on Shopify.
The e-commerce brands we know and love today were built in large part thanks to the ability to find great customers anywhere. Warby Parker, GymShark, Alo Yoga, Our Place, and many others were able to grow and serve customers across a wide geography due to the ability to show people ads online in a highly effective way.
The next wave of great consumer companies is being built with influencer content. We are clearly seeing that people love to follow content creators and influencers across a wide spectrum. Either through relatability or inspiration they offer us ideas for products that would be useful to us.
However, the ecosystem is going through a fundamental shift. Privacy policies, like the Apple privacy shift that prevents user tracking, have increased the cost of finding and serving new customers dramatically. Traditional ad and affiliate approaches are now too expensive and ineffective for many brands to grow. The traditional funnel — as well as the landing page templates and PDP-to-checkout experiences that support it — is no longer linear.
So new tools must be built in order to enable growing brands to effectively acquire new customers.
“Driving top of the funnel, new customer acquisition in lock-step with scaling educational, brand building content — and doing all of this seamlessly without checkout friction — is the holy grail for a DTC company. FERMÀT is leading the way by scaling a frictionless creator economy that helps us offer new audiences a built-in brand experience including checkout.” Tina Hedges, Founder & CEO, LOLI Beauty
Today, FERMÀT serves dozens of brands in enabling their influencer and ambassador networks to create directly shoppable experiences in their content. In so doing, we are helping make new customer acquisition both more enjoyable for the consumer and influencer, and more effective for the brand.
We are unlocking the ability to scalably create direct shopping experiences with your influencer network. Today we are excited to announce the new features we’ve been working on.
Open onboarding for Shopify Brands + supporting other platforms:
If you are a brand on Shopify (or Shopify Plus) we’ve now made it very simple for you to directly sign up and onboard yourself onto the platform to get started working with your influencer network on these direct shopping experiences! If you are on any other platform, we are excited to share our back end is now extensible to any platform, so please sign up and someone from our team will help with next steps.
Closed loop analytics and support for your current attribution system:
We recently also launched our analytics dashboard that show you your closed loop analytics for every point in the funnel: impression, cart fill, and transaction for each of your influencer collaborations. Giving you the powerful data you need to optimize your influencer strategy. We also know that this data needs to live in your favorite analytics platforms, and so we’re making it easy for you to export wherever you need it!
A beautiful and seamless influencer interface:
Finally, we understand the importance of simplicity for the influencer. So we’ve made it easy for them to do their work directly on their phone. It only takes two thumbs, and under two minutes to stand up a shopping experience native to their content. Of course, we also automate some of the operational flows needed for your partnership with the influencer.
FERMÀT was started less than a year ago, and in the short time that we’ve been working on enabling distributed commerce we’ve seen the ecosystem acknowledge the importance of direct influencer driven commerce.
With this capital raise, we are excited to have the opportunity to work with our lead investors, Saam Motamedi at Greylock, and Victoria Zuo at QED Investors. I’m also lucky to partner with one of my oldest friends, Vasu Kulkarni and his team at Courtside Ventures. We have a number of operators and leaders in the space joining us for the journey, including: Eric Seufert (Founder, Mobile Dev Memo), Joel Jewitt (Co-Founder, LiveRamp), Ben Faw (Founder, Best Reviews and Dynamism Capital), and several others.