ai-commerce
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Kaushik Mahorker and the work behind an answer
Before Wildcard turned toward AI shopping, Kaushik Mahorker worked on the systems that make software useful at scale. His next problem is decidedly retail: helping a product earn its place in the answer.
Naveen Tewari and the business of changing your mind
He grew up on the IIT Kanpur campus, where a life in academia seemed the natural choice. From an SMS search service to InMobi and Glance, Naveen Tewari has made a career of spotting when an idea needs a bigger canvas.
Duran Inci and the Trouble With Getting Noticed
From online stores to the CEO’s office at Zen Media, Duran Inci has followed the work that attention leaves unfinished. His next chapter, at Ecommerce.com, puts the same question to AI: can a customer actually find what they came to buy?
Raptive discovered the money behind the recipe
Raptive sold its own publications to help independent publishers earn more. Now the company behind thousands of websites is trying to make the same bargain work in the age of AI.
BSPK Wants to Remember What the Store Forgot
A luxury sale can begin in a boutique and end on a phone. BSPK gives the person serving the customer a memory that follows both.
Jonathan Taylor and the Quiet War on Choice
The Zoovu co-founder spent years teaching software to understand difficult products. Now, as CEO, Jonathan Taylor is betting that the future of shopping begins with a less fashionable virtue: clean data.
Tychons Spent 28 Years Learning the Unsexy Plumbing Behind the Buy Button
The Atlanta-headquartered, Chennai-built services firm does not sell the glamorous part of ecommerce. It connects the storefront to the ERP, warehouse, payments and reporting systems that have to work after the campaign ends.
Sandra Lifshits Is Teaching AI to Hunt for Vintage
After weekends in vintage markets and shifts inside New York shops, the product leader saw the real problem: secondhand shopping had plenty of inventory and precious little editing.
The Company Betting Your Next Purchase Is Already Yours
Ordergroove sells brands a simple, expensive idea: the cheapest customer to acquire is the one who already bought. Here is how a company started in a Manhattan apartment built the plumbing behind the subscribe-and-save button.
Mariam Naficy Keeps Rewriting the Way Taste Becomes a Product
After Eve.com and Minted, the San Francisco founder is making a third wager on consumer behavior: that the next shopping interface begins with an idea, not an inventory page.
Cart.com Wants To Be The Operating System Behind Everything You Buy Online
Founded in 2020, the Houston company stitched together software and a warehouse network to sell brands one thing they rarely get: their orders, inventory and shipping in a single place.
Commerce
Commerce (Commerce.com, Inc., Nasdaq: CMRC) is the parent brand of BigCommerce, Feedonomics and Makeswift, formed when BigCommerce rebranded on July 31, 2025. It positions itself as an open, AI-driven commerce ecosystem that combines an enterprise ecommerce operating system (BigCommerce), AI-powered product-data optimization and syndication (Feedonomics), and a visual, composable storefront builder (Makeswift). The company targets complex B2B and B2C brands that need to manage owned sites, marketplaces, wholesale and social channels, and is orienting its roadmap toward 'agentic commerce' where AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity drive product discovery.
eko
eko is a New York-based media-technology company that turns product footage and data into interactive, shoppable video experiences for online retail. Founded in 2010 as Interlude to pioneer 'choose-your-own-adventure' interactive entertainment, the company rebranded to eko in 2016 and later pivoted toward ecommerce, using AI-driven tools to build interactive product pages, 360-degree product views and verified product data that help brands and retailers - most notably its long-time partner Walmart - lift engagement and conversion.
Shopify
Shopify is a Canadian commerce company that provides a unified software platform for businesses to start, run, and grow retail operations across online stores, physical locations, social channels, and marketplaces. Launched in 2006 by snowboard-shop founders frustrated with existing store software, it now powers millions of merchants in more than 175 countries and handled roughly $378 billion in gross merchandise volume in 2025. Beyond the storefront builder, Shopify sells payments, capital, shipping, point-of-sale hardware, and a growing set of AI tools, positioning itself as the commerce infrastructure behind a large share of independent and enterprise brands.
Travis Hess
Travis Hess is the CEO of Commerce.com (the company formerly known as BigCommerce), the publicly traded ecommerce platform he rebranded in 2025 to bet the business on AI-driven, agentic commerce. An agency and consulting veteran who spent 15-plus years scaling direct-to-consumer brands at Accenture, The Stable, and BVA before ever running a software company, he joined BigCommerce as President in May 2024 and took the CEO seat that October. He is candid to a fault about the hard parts of the job, once comparing the experience of watching the stock price to 'getting wedgied in front of the class every day.'
FERMÀT
FERMÀT is an AI-native commerce platform that builds personalized shopping experiences in the space between an ad click and checkout. Founded in 2021 by former LiveRamp executives Rishabh Jain and Shreyas Kumar, the San Francisco company gives brands no-code tools to spin up custom product pages, funnels, bundles, and dynamic offers, powered by a behavioral data layer it calls the Commerce Graph. It turns real shopper behavior into revenue, and its newer AI Search engine helps brands stay visible inside answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Dipti Desai
Dipti Desai is the co-founder and CEO of Crstl, a San Francisco startup rebuilding B2B commerce around the decades-old EDI standard that quietly governs how brands sell to retailers. A Virginia Tech electrical engineer and Uber data-platform veteran, she stumbled into the problem while volunteering to sell PPE online during the pandemic and discovering that the plumbing of wholesale was stuck in the 1980s. She has raised over $10 million from Target, Shopify Ventures, Cohen Circle, and Village Global to make EDI usable by people who are not developers.
Rishabh Jain
Rishabh Jain is the co-founder and CEO of FERMÀT, a San Francisco AI-native commerce platform that builds personalized, content-native shopping experiences for direct-to-consumer and enterprise brands. A LiveRamp alum who saw Apple's privacy changes coming before most, he launched FERMÀT in late 2021 to rewire how brands sell when shoppers can no longer be tracked across the web. The company has raised roughly $86M across rounds, capped by a $45M Series B in June 2025, and counts Glossier, GNC, ILIA Beauty, BISSELL and Unilever's Olly among its customers.
Vincent Yang
Vincent Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Firework, the world's largest AI-powered video commerce platform. A serial entrepreneur with a Stanford MBA, he previously co-founded EverString (acquired by ZoomInfo) and built a career spanning investment banking at J.P. Morgan and venture investing at Summit Partners. At Firework, Yang raised $270M+ in funding - including a $150M SoftBank Vision Fund 2-led Series B - and built a platform used by 1,500+ global brands to embed shoppable live and short-form video directly on their owned digital properties. Named to Ad Age's Tech Power List 2024, he is now betting on agentic AI as the next frontier of commerce.