Fabric is building a headless commerce platform and is now armed with $9.5 million in seed funding to continue helping direct-to-consumer and B2B brands utilize an e-commerce platform designed for their needs.
Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily
The round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Sierra Ventures and Expa. As part of the investment, Alex Bard, partner and managing director at Redpoint Ventures, and Tim Guleri, managing partner at Sierra Ventures, will join Fabric’s board of directors.
In addition to the raise, the Seattle-based company announced its new CEO. Faisal Masud, who previously led multibillion-dollar commerce businesses at Amazon, eBay, Groupon and Staples, picks up what Shiv Agarwal and Ryan Bartley started in 2017.
“I was advising the team for a while, and it was also clear that Fabric was a unique need for professional services around e-commerce,” Masud told Crunchbase News. “In the overall history of platforms, they were built for small and medium businesses that outgrew them. So what do you do? Our thesis is working with mid-market businesses and smaller, providing a tool that grows with them.”
When it was clear that COVID-19, as well as consumer tastes, were elevating e-commerce sales, many D2C and B2B brands sought to boost their online exposure and grab a piece of a global e-commerce market that was expected to grow to $5 trillion by 2021. In turn, investors have sunk capital into e-commerce platforms over the past few months, including:
- Chiper, a Colombia-based e-commerce platform for independent merchants, raised $12 million in Series A funding.
- Homesome secured a $6.7 million Series A to help independent grocers offer online ordering and same-day delivery to their customers.
- Pattern raised a $52 million Series A to aid retailers and consumer brands eager to sell online globally.
- Ecwid announced a $42 million round for small businesses wanting an e-commerce presence.
“Amazon and Shopify redefined what the shopper experience should be like, and there is pressure on e-tailers to deliver an experience like that,” Bard said in an interview. “Fabric built out a product so they don’t have to rely on legacy products. If they can pull it off, this will be big and important for the consumer experience.”
Meanwhile, Fabric is already working with brands, including ABC Carpet & Home, BuildDirect and GNC, to build out customer experiences quickly and less expensively using SaaS and an interface that integrates with whatever platforms the company is using, Masud said.
Fabric will put the new funds to work building out the platform and its apps, as well as maturing the sales and marketing processes, he added. The company is also rounding out its leadership team.
“We have been fortunate to have early customers,” Masud said. “We had been operating pretty much in stealth until the end of March, and now that we have this injection of capital, we are in position to go out there. We expect double or triple the growth, depending on how we approach it.”
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias
Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the Crunchbase Daily.
67.1K Followers