A store for every scroll
Sixty stores in an hour. That is what Rishabh Jain watched happen on a screen one afternoon, when the wellness brand mindbodygreen started spinning up storefront after storefront inside FERMÀT. Nobody told them to. They had simply stopped thinking of a website as one front door and started treating every ad, every article, every reel as its own shop with its own logic. The number on the dashboard kept ticking up, and Jain realized his customers had grasped the product faster than his own pitch deck had.
That is the through-line of FERMÀT, the company Jain co-founded in late 2021 and runs as CEO: the people using it keep teaching him what it is for. True Classic, the men's shirt brand, used it for engagement goals that had nothing to do with a transaction. The platform's job, as Jain frames it, is to let a brand build a tailored commerce experience native to whatever content it ships - a TikTok, a podcast read, a paid ad - rather than dumping every visitor onto the same generic homepage and hoping.
The official line is that FERMÀT is "the AI-native commerce platform generating brands' shopping experiences for stronger engagement and conversion." The lived reality is messier and more interesting: a behavioral engine that watches how shoppers move, then assembles the funnel that fits them.
When you can't track people anymore, the entire premise on which we interact on the consumer internet completely changes.Rishabh Jain
The Pivot Behind The CompanyHe left before the floor fell out
Most founders react to a market shift. Jain anticipated one. In the summer of 2020 he was a senior leader at LiveRamp - the data-connectivity company where he had run innovation, technical services, and product operations - when Apple announced App Tracking Transparency. The change sounded like a settings toggle. Jain read it as a demolition order for the entire tracking-based consumer internet he had spent his career inside.
So he did the unglamorous thing: he started sketching a new company while still employed. He met Greylock's Saam Motamedi late that year, kept his head down through 2021, and formally launched FERMÀT that November alongside co-founder Shreyas Kumar, a fellow LiveRamp alum. The thesis was that if brands could no longer follow shoppers across the web, they would have to win them inside their own experiences - and someone needed to build the infrastructure for that.
It is a peculiar origin for a commerce company: not a frustrated shopper, not a Shopify power-seller, but two ad-tech operators who understood exactly which plumbing was about to rust. On X, Jain still describes himself, with a shrug of honesty, as a "long-time lover of ads and commerce." The affection is real. So was the timing.
His years at LiveRamp gave him what he calls a first-class view into what it means to provide engaging consumer experiences - the kind of seat where you watch billions of impressions resolve into clicks and learn, viscerally, how fragile the whole chain is. When the chain broke, he didn't need a research report to tell him what came next. He had been holding the broken end.
The Resume Nobody ExpectsPhysics, materials, mattresses
Before any of this, Jain collected the kind of academic credentials that usually lead somewhere other than e-commerce. Degrees from Wharton and the engineering school at the University of Pennsylvania. A master's in physics from Imperial College London. A PhD in materials science from MIT. The natural next step is a lab or a quant desk. Jain went and co-founded two startups instead - one in solar energy, one in laboratory data sharing - before landing at LiveRamp.
There is a logic to it if you squint. Materials science is the study of why things behave the way they do under stress, at scale, over time. Swap atoms for shoppers and you get something close to what FERMÀT's "commerce graph" tries to do: model behavior densely enough to predict what a person needs to see next. Jain didn't abandon the discipline. He pointed it at a checkout page.
Business and engineering, side by side.
Master's in Physics.
PhD, Materials Science.
Growth, in bars not adjectives
Jain tends to undersell the metrics, which makes them easier to trust. Since the Series A, FERMÀT has grown annual recurring revenue more than fivefold and tripled its headcount. Early on there was a Q4 stretch where gross merchandise value through the platform multiplied 125 times over twelve weeks - the kind of curve that either signals product-market fit or a broken spreadsheet. It was the former. The customer roster did the rest of the talking: Glossier, GNC, ILIA Beauty, BISSELL, Backcountry, Adapt Naturals, and Unilever's Olly.
The June 2025 Series B - $45 million led by VMG Partners, with QED, Greylock, Bain Capital Ventures and Courtside Ventures along for the ride - is earmarked for the unsexy, durable things: a deeper commerce graph, beefier data infrastructure, and an expanded program for the agencies that actually deploy FERMÀT for brands.
Don't lead with the robot
In a market where every deck now opens with "AI-powered," Jain is oddly reluctant to do the obvious. He insists on starting with the customer's problem and only then reaching for whatever tool solves it best. His test for positioning is almost folksy: get people nodding along to the problem before you ever name your answer.
Positioning to me is more about first, how do you get people to nod along?Rishabh Jain, on going to market
The deeper question he keeps returning to is about moats, not models: what is the compounding advantage that competitors can't simply copy next quarter? For FERMÀT, the bet is that the behavioral data - the commerce graph - gets smarter the more it sees, and that this lead widens rather than narrows. It is a materials-scientist's answer to a marketer's problem.
That patience extends to how he reads the macro picture. Jain describes himself as medium-term optimistic on e-commerce - clear-eyed that the near term is choppy, convinced that the new wave of AI tooling makes the longer horizon richer than the one he left behind at LiveRamp. The pragmatism shows up in the spend, too: rather than pour the Series B into a louder brand campaign, FERMÀT is investing in the agency partners - names like Tinuiti and Common Thread Collective - who put the platform into the hands of brands that will never read a funding press release.
What's NextShopping that starts inside the chatbot
Jain's gaze is already past the homepage. He talks about a near future where commerce begins not on Google but inside an AI conversation - a shopper asking ChatGPT what to buy, an agent doing the browsing on their behalf. FERMÀT's recent AI Search Commerce Engine is aimed squarely at that shift, trying to make sure brands show up and convert when the first touch is a model, not a search bar.
We believe that within a few years, every commerce experience - from ads to agentic shoppers to in real life placements - will be powered by FERMÀT's personalized commerce technology.Rishabh Jain
It is a big claim. But Jain has a habit of being early to the right rooms - he was sketching a post-cookie company before most people had read the Apple release. The 60 stores in an hour suggested the market agrees faster than he can pitch. Whether agentic commerce arrives in two years or ten, the person building for it is the same one who once asked what happens when you can no longer follow anybody, and decided to build the answer rather than mourn the question.