Why we invested in FERMÀT: The next generation of influencer-led commerce

FERMÀT raises a $14M Seed from Greylock, QED, Montage, Courtside, and angels.

E-commerce sales are poised to be a $5.5 trillion global industry this year, yet it is more challenging than ever for brands to navigate the current commerce ecosystem. Early successes of D2C brands like Warby Parker, Hims, and Glossier can be attributed to capabilities of digital marketing tools that collect massive amounts of data on consumer profiles and behaviors. Unfortunately in today’s e-commerce environment, marketers are unable to fully track their performance marketing campaigns, given new consumer data privacy rules and the push towards a cookie-less world. As a result, brands are left in the dark to battle skyrocketing user acquisition costs.

Influencer marketing has emerged as a winning strategy for brands to efficiently reach their consumers through the established trust of an influencer. However, this strategy is hard to scale due to data attribution leakage, as traditional tracking methods rely on the obsolete infrastructure of third-party cookies.

Enter FERMÀT: an embedded shopping experience at the point of content. From an Instagram story link to a blog page, consumers can directly checkout products in a frictionless experience. Brands are now able to fully track and own the entire attribution lifecycle from the moment of impression to purchased order, across both creators and platforms. Creators can link their affiliated products across channels, curate their own storefront, and can, for the first time ever, truly understand their audience and conversion metrics at the individual content level.

The founding team, Rishabh Jain (CEO) and Shreyas Kumar (CTO), bring deep engineering experience from LiveRamp (NYSE: RAMP), a data enablement platform for marketing and analytics. As an early investor in some of the most exciting emerging consumer brands such as Live Tinted, Crown Affair, Revela and Copper Cow Coffee, we have had first-hand insights into the business challenges that brands are facing and have spent time looking for new infrastructure solutions to help address these acute pain points. When we met Rishabh and Shreyas, we were struck by their vision, technical execution, and thoughtful leadership.

In geometry, the Fermat point of a triangle has the shortest sum distance to the three vertices. Similarly, FERMÀT bridges the connection between creators, brands, and consumers to power seamless and engaging shopping experiences anywhere on the Internet. We are thrilled to back the team, alongside Greylock and QED, in their $14M Seed funding to power the next generation of commerce.

For any ambitious operators and builders, Fermat is hiring across a variety of roles!