e-commerce
(117)
The Bottle That Works Like a Mom, From a Team That Ran Medela
A former Medela executive and a Harvard-MBA operator spent more than a decade re-engineering the baby bottle. The pitch is simple: make the bottle behave like the breast so babies stop refusing one for the other.
Abt Built One Store. Then It Outlasted Everyone Who Built a Thousand.
A family-owned retailer in the Chicago suburbs has spent nearly 90 years betting everything on one store - dancing fountain, saltwater shark tank and all - while national chains opened, expanded, and disappeared around it.
The Agency That Shipped the First Banner Ad - And Then Refused to Die
Organic built the web's first banner ads in the mid-90s, went public at the peak, nearly vanished in the crash, and got bought by Omnicom. Three decades on it is still standing - now a Cincinnati-run agency trying to make advertising both good-looking and accountable.
The 18th Street Camera Shop That Refused to Become a Website
A Holocaust survivor opened a camera counter on 34th Street in 1974. Fifty years later his shop is a rental house, a photo lab, a B2B supplier and a YouTube school - and it still keeps the lights on at one address in the Flatiron District.
The Boston bank that only speaks fluent brand
A boutique bank that refuses to do anything but consumer deals just got a lot bigger. Here is how a Boston firm turned brand obsession into a specialty M&A practice - and why Origin Merchant Partners bought in.
The Turkish Word for Owner Became a Verb
Turkey's biggest marketplace started with 2,700 classified ads in 2000. A quarter century later, 'sahibinden' is how the country buys a house, sells a car, and rents an apartment - so much so that the name stopped being a website and started being a habit.
The Qatari Delivery App That Turned a Business-School Project Into a Billion-Riyal Exit
A university idea from HEC Paris became Qatar's first billion-riyal tech exit. Here is how Snoonu built a delivery machine that food, groceries and everything else now runs through.
The store that sells hair color to the person doing your hair - and to you
One of America's largest beauty-supply chains sells the same professional hair color to salon pros and to the customers coloring their own roots at home. Here is how a 1964 New Orleans shop became a two-sided, 5,000-store beauty distributor.
The Sneaker Shop That Runs Its Own Radio Station
How a single Baltimore shoe store became a 250-location fixture of American sneaker culture - and why it plays its own soundtrack.
How a Ski Store Thrives in a City That Barely Freezes
Sun & Ski Sports started as a Midwest ski warehouse, moved to Houston in 1980, and built a four-decade business on one bet: the customer buying a snowboard in December wants a paddleboard in June.
IKEA
How a Swedish teenager's mail-order side hustle became the world's largest furniture retailer - and why the whole thing runs on flat boxes, cheap Allen keys, and a foundation that answers to no shareholder.
Sur La Table
The 1972 Pike Place kitchen shop that turned selling whisks into teaching dinner - and survived a pandemic bankruptcy by betting the store on the class.
ButcherBox
How a founder who once lost investors' money built a half-billion-dollar meat company on a Kickstarter, a trash bag of grass-fed beef, and a refusal to take venture capital.
Church & Dwight Co., Inc.
It started with baking soda in 1846. Nearly two centuries later, the quiet New Jersey company behind Arm & Hammer has turned buying other people's brands into a business worth more than $25 billion.
Signet Jewelers
One Ohio company quietly owns Kay, Zales, Jared, Blue Nile and Banter - and rings up roughly one of every three engagement rings sold in America. Meet the $6.8 billion machine behind the moment you got down on one knee.
Bateriku.com
Battery Replacement & Roadside Assistance Anywhere in Malaysia - enjoy free delivery as fast as 30 minutes, free inspection and free installation.
Aruna
Aruna is Indonesia's largest integrated fisheries commerce platform, connecting small-scale coastal fishermen directly to domestic and global seafood buyers through a digital supply chain. Founded in 2016 by three Telkom University students, it removes layers of middlemen, uses local agents and mobile tools to onboard fishers, and pairs commerce with traceability, cold chain, and sustainability programs. The company operates across most of Indonesia's coastline and exports to dozens of countries under a 'People, Profit, Planet' mission.
AI Rudder
AI Rudder is a Singapore-based voice AI company that automates high-volume customer phone calls and chats for banks, lenders, insurers, e-commerce and logistics firms. Its human-sounding voice agents handle payment reminders, verification, surveys, telemarketing and customer service across 15+ languages and regional accents, letting enterprises scale contact-center work without adding headcount. Backed by Sequoia, Tiger Global and Coatue, it serves 500+ enterprise clients concentrated in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Bezel
Bezel is a Y Combinator (W25) startup that generates studio-quality photos and videos of apparel on photorealistic AI human models. Fashion and e-commerce brands upload a clothing image, pick a preset model, and get shoot-ready stills and video in seconds - replacing shoots that cost thousands of dollars and take days. Founded in 2025 in New York by Kashyap Achar, the company positions itself as an on-demand content engine for brands that need constant creative variety for ad testing.
Bikry App (Bizrise Technologies YC W20)
Bikry, built by Bizrise Technologies (Y Combinator W20), is a no-code direct-to-consumer platform that lets Indian retailers and small business owners launch an online store in minutes at 0% commission. It bundles a shareable catalog, 40+ digital payment options, and 35+ pan-India delivery partners so shop owners can sell through WhatsApp and social media without building a website or paying marketplace fees.
QUIK
QUIK is a Maracaibo-born super app that lets Venezuelans pay, save, shop and get food or groceries delivered in about 30 minutes, all from one phone. Its stablecoin-backed wallet lets users hold and spend in a currency that holds its value in a country long battered by inflation, while its QUIK Pro side gives merchants the software to run their storefront, inventory and logistics. Backed by Y Combinator in the Winter 2022 batch, it was the first startup from Maracaibo to be accepted into the accelerator.
Topship
Topship is a Lagos-based digital freight forwarder that lets African businesses and individuals ship parcels, cargo and freight to and from more than 150 countries. Founded in 2020 and part of Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, it functions as an asset-light shipping layer - booking, tracking, insurance and, increasingly, an AI shipping assistant - aimed at the merchants who move goods across borders but were previously stuck with informal agents and opaque pricing.
YC Ventures
YC Ventures is a Dubai-based diversified investment company built on a maritime core. It owns and operates dry-bulk ships, manages technical and crew operations for a wider fleet, and recycles the returns into technology ventures spanning maritime fintech (Shipfinex), marine e-commerce procurement (Shipskart), lithium energy storage (Terranova), and youth leadership education. Led by Group CEO Yasovardhan Chinni, the group works across the UAE, India, Singapore, Nigeria and the USA under the operating idea of owning the asset, running the voyage, and compounding the capital into the next venture.
GudangAda
GudangAda is an Indonesian B2B e-commerce marketplace founded in 2019 that connects manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers and retail stores across the country's fragmented fast-moving-consumer-goods supply chain. Alongside its marketplace it offers logistics, merchant tools and financing so small retailers can source, order, pay and receive goods in one app. After scaling to roughly half a million SMEs and about $6 billion in transaction value on more than $135 million of venture funding, the company retrenched from its capital-intensive FMCG model and pivoted toward beauty and personal-care retail under its Kaka Beauty brand.
MNT-Halan
MNT-Halan is an Egyptian fintech that digitally banks the unbanked and underbanked across emerging markets. Founded by Mounir Nakhla, it combines microfinance, consumer and business lending, buy-now-pay-later, mobile wallets, payments and an FMCG/appliance e-commerce marketplace into a single app, all powered by its proprietary Neuron core-banking technology. It became Egypt's first fintech unicorn in 2023 and now operates across Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and the UAE, having disbursed billions of dollars in loans to millions of customers.
Abercrombie & Fitch Co.
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE: ANF) is a Columbus, Ohio-based global specialty apparel retailer that operates a family of brands - Abercrombie & Fitch, abercrombie kids, Hollister, Gilly Hicks, Social Tourist and the YPB activewear line - across roughly 840 company-operated stores, a franchise network and a digital business that accounts for close to half of revenue. Founded in 1892 as a Manhattan outfitter that supplied Theodore Roosevelt's safaris and counted Ernest Hemingway among its customers, the company spent the 2010s dismantling the exclusionary teen-mall identity it had built in the 1990s and 2000s. Under CEO Fran Horowitz, who took over in 2017, it split its two flagship brands into distinct demographic lanes - Abercrombie for millennials in their twenties and thirties, Hollister for teenagers - shrank store footprints, and rebuilt merchandising around a lean-inventory 'chase' model that reads early demand signals and reorders fast. The approach produced record fiscal 2025 net sales of $5.27 billion, a third straight year of double-digit operating margin, and one of the more complete reputational reversals in modern American retail.
ANINE BING
ANINE BING is a Los Angeles-based global fashion house founded in 2012 by Danish designer Anine Bing and her husband Nicolai Bing. Built out of a Silver Lake garage and scaled through a highly engaged social-media audience, the brand pairs Scandinavian minimalism with American energy to make timeless wardrobe essentials - leather jackets, denim, knitwear, jewelry and accessories - sold direct-to-consumer online and through a growing network of global retail stores. Backed by Index Ventures, Greycroft and Felix Capital, ANINE BING has grown into a nine-figure business operating dozens of stores worldwide.
Ann Taylor
Ann Taylor is an American specialty retailer of women's clothing, shoes, and accessories, founded in 1954 and known for polished, tailored wardrobing aimed at professional women. Headquartered in New York's Times Square, the brand operates a network of stores and an e-commerce platform, and sits alongside sister label LOFT under KnitWell Group, a portfolio company of private-equity firm Sycamore Partners.
Ariat International
Ariat International is a Union City, California footwear and apparel company founded in 1993 that applied athletic-shoe technology to riding boots and grew into the world's largest equestrian sports brand. Today it designs performance boots, western wear, workwear and flame-resistant gear for riders, ranchers, tradespeople and outdoor enthusiasts, sold globally through retailers and direct-to-consumer channels.
Billy Reid
Billy Reid is an American luxury fashion house based in Florence, Alabama, founded by four-time CFDA-winning designer Billy Reid. Known as 'American luxury built to last,' the brand blends Southern craft and hospitality with a New York sensibility, offering menswear, womenswear, custom tailoring, footwear and accessories through freestanding stores, wholesale partners and a direct-to-consumer site. Beyond clothing, Billy Reid is a culture brand - its Shindig festival brings together music, food, art and design in the Muscle Shoals region.