Pattern Brands is a New York-based family of consumer home brands built around a single mission: helping people enjoy daily life. Founded in 2019 by the team behind the influential agency Gin Lane, Pattern acquires, operates, and grows leading Shopify-based home and lifestyle brands on one shared operating platform - pairing in-house operational expertise with the design sensibility that helped launch dozens of well-known DTC companies. Its portfolio has included GIR, Equal Parts, Open Spaces, Letterfolk, Yield, Poketo, Onsen, and Miracle Made.
Privy is an email and SMS marketing platform built for independent ecommerce brands - the small Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix and WooCommerce stores that can't afford an enterprise marketing stack. Founded in Boston in 2011 by Ben Jabbawy, Privy pairs list-growth popups, drag-and-drop email, SMS campaigns and pre-built automations with hands-on coaching, so a one-person shop can run the kind of marketing usually reserved for big brands. It is the most-reviewed email and SMS app in the Shopify App Store and has helped 500,000+ merchants in 180+ countries drive billions in sales.
Studs is a New York-based ear piercing and earrings brand that pairs licensed, needle-based piercing studios with a large e-commerce and in-store catalog of flatback studs, hoops, huggies and clickers. Founded in 2019 by Anna Harman and Lisa Bubbers, the company coined the idea of 'Earscaping' - curating a personalized stack of piercings and jewelry - and positions itself as a modern, hygienic alternative to mall piercing-gun kiosks and tattoo-shop counters. It operates a fleet of profitable studios across the U.S. alongside a direct-to-consumer online store.
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.
GearLaunch is a print-on-demand commerce platform that lets entrepreneurs design, sell, and ship custom products without holding inventory or paying upfront. Sellers handle the creative and marketing; GearLaunch handles production, printing, fulfillment, payment processing, and worldwide shipping across a catalog of thousands of customizable items.
Create Wellness is a New York-based consumer health company that built the world's first creatine monohydrate gummy, turning a messy, bodybuilder-coded powder into a low-sugar daily habit. Founded in 2022 by husband-and-wife team Dan and Sienna McCormick, the brand sells creatine gummies, electrolyte stick packs, and unflavored powder direct-to-consumer and through Target, GNC, The Vitamin Shoppe, Sprouts, and Wegmans. With more than 250 million gummies sold and $25M+ raised across Series A and Series B rounds, Create is trying to take creatine from the 2% of people who use it to the other 98%.
Remarkable AI (formerly Chatdesk) is a New York-based customer engagement platform that pairs AI with a network of vetted brand experts to handle support, retention, and acquisition for consumer and e-commerce brands. Its software connects to a brand's existing stack - Shopify, Zendesk, email, SMS, and social - to resolve tickets, win back lapsed customers, and turn social comments and DMs into sales, 24/7 and in the brand's own voice.
Rylan Hamilton is the CEO and co-founder of Blue Water Autonomy, a Boston defense-tech company building large, software-defined, uncrewed ships for the U.S. Navy. A Navy surface warfare officer turned robotics entrepreneur, he was an early leader at Kiva Systems (acquired by Amazon for $775M) and co-founded the warehouse-robot maker 6 River Systems (sold to Shopify for $450M). Now he is taking the 'mobile robot' idea back to the ocean - aiming to be the Waymo of the open sea, with a $50M GV-led Series A and a first full-scale autonomous ship slated for the water in 2026.
Gorgias is a conversational AI and helpdesk platform built for ecommerce brands. It unifies email, chat, SMS, voice and social into one inbox, then layers an AI Agent that resolves a majority of tickets automatically while turning support into a revenue channel.
Kevin Liu is a licensed CPA and co-founder of Numeral, the AI-native sales tax compliance platform backed by $57M in funding. Drawing on his Big 4 accounting background at KPMG and hands-on experience building 7- and 8-figure ecommerce brands, Liu brought the tax expertise needed to automate the full sales tax lifecycle - from registration to filing - for thousands of ecommerce and SaaS businesses across 70+ countries.
Masahiro 'Masa' Shimizu is the Founder & CEO of ZEALS Co., Ltd. and Omakase.ai, the Japanese pioneer of Chat Commerce. He started ZEALS as a Meiji University freshman in 2014 with robots and a mission to 'elevate Japan,' pivoted to chatbots within one month of Facebook opening its Messenger API in 2016, built Japan's #1 social chat commerce platform with 300+ employees and $69M+ raised, and is now taking that same hospitality-first philosophy — what he calls 'Omotenashi' — into voice-powered AI agents for global e-commerce through Omakase.ai.
Romain Lapeyre is the Co-founder and CEO of Gorgias, the AI-powered customer experience platform built for ecommerce brands. Founded in Paris in 2015 with co-founder Alex Plugaru and later relocated to San Francisco, Gorgias has grown to serve 16,400+ merchants including Glossier, Steve Madden, and Dollar Shave Club, reaching $80M ARR with roughly 520 employees and $103M+ in total funding. Lapeyre studied at HEC Paris and has built Gorgias using a data-driven, partner-led growth model - scaling to 10,000+ customers without traditional cold calling.
Sam Ross is the Co-Founder and CEO of Numeral, an AI-native sales tax compliance platform built for ecommerce and SaaS businesses. He discovered the pain of multi-state tax complexity while running his own eight-figure DTC brands after leaving Airbnb, where he worked in growth under Gustaf Alstromer. That firsthand frustration became Numeral's founding insight. Backed by Y Combinator (W23), Benchmark, and Mayfield, Numeral raised a $35M Series B in September 2025 at a $350M valuation, with over $71M raised in total. The platform processes more than $5 billion in transactions annually, has filed over 150,000 tax returns, and serves 2,000+ businesses including Eight Sleep, Ridge, and Graza.
Numeral is an AI-native sales tax compliance platform that automates the entire lifecycle of US sales tax and global VAT for e-commerce and SaaS companies — from nexus tracking and registration through filing, remittance, and exemption certificates. Founded in 2022 by Sam Ross and Matt DuVall and based in San Francisco, the company raised a $35M Series B in September 2025 led by Mayfield, bringing total funding to $57M and valuing the company at $350M.
Siddharth Sinha is the Co-founder and CEO of Dresma, an AI-powered visual content platform that helps ecommerce sellers create studio-quality product images and marketing content at scale. A fourth-generation entrepreneur from Bihar, India, with a Cornell BS and INSEAD MBA, he co-founded Dresma in 2019 alongside his wife Nishka and partner Abhishek Kirti. Dresma's flagship product DoMyShoot has processed over 9 million ecommerce photos for 50,000+ online brands - reducing content creation costs by 85% and cutting time-to-market by 90%. The company raised a $3M seed round in 2021 from SVQuad, Inventus Capital Partners, and Thinkuvate.
Tobias 'Tobi' Lütke is the German-Canadian co-founder and CEO of Shopify, one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms. Born in 1980 in Koblenz, Germany, he received a computer at age six and left school after 10th grade to complete a programming apprenticeship, never attending university. After emigrating to Canada in 2003, he built an online snowboard shop called Snowdevil and — finding every existing e-commerce platform inadequate — coded his own solution in Ruby on Rails in two months. That solution became Shopify, which he launched as a standalone product in 2006. Shopify went public in 2015, and as of 2025 processes over $1.6 trillion in cumulative gross merchandise volume for millions of merchants across 175+ countries, commanding over 14% of the US e-commerce market. Lutke is known for his radical candor, his open-source roots, and his unusual interests for a tech CEO: competitive racing driver, avid skier, and serious gamer who credits strategy games with shaping his business thinking. His April 2025 internal memo mandating AI proficiency as a baseline expectation became one of the most widely-discussed corporate AI policy statements of the year.
Yuma AI is a Boston-based AI customer support platform purpose-built for ecommerce brands. Founded in late 2022 by serial YC founder Guillaume Luccisano (Socialcam, Triplebyte), Yuma deploys autonomous AI agents that resolve 60–93% of customer support tickets end-to-end — handling returns, refunds, WISMO queries, and order changes — inside the helpdesks merchants already use (Gorgias, Zendesk, Kustomer and more). With 100+ paying Shopify merchants, over 5 million automated queries, and a $5M seed round backed by Google's Gradient Ventures, Yuma is building the AI customer experience layer for modern commerce.
Zaymo is a YC W24-backed B2B SaaS company based in Lehi, Utah that turns static marketing emails into interactive mini-apps. Built on AMP for Email technology and deeply integrated with Klaviyo and Shopify, Zaymo lets ecommerce brands embed one-click purchasing, subscription management, review collection, and gamified elements directly inside the inbox — no redirect required. Customers report 12–15X ROI, 24–52% reductions in subscription churn, and conversion lifts that static email simply cannot match.
Alex Danco is a Canadian writer, thinker, and now Editor-at-Large at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he shapes the firm's editorial voice. A former neuroscientist turned ska musician turned VC associate turned Shopify product director, Danco spent five years at Shopify leading merchant financing and blockchain initiatives before joining a16z in August 2025. He is best known for his newsletter Dancoland and foundational essays including 'Debt Is Coming,' 'The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class,' and the 'Emergent Layers' framework - works that apply Carlota Perez, René Girard, and Jane Jacobs to the inner workings of Silicon Valley. He writes approximately 5,000 words per week and is a descendant of Belgian polar explorer Émile Danco, after whom Danco Island in Antarctica is named.
Krystal Wu is a Boston-based community and marketing program manager known for building engaged B2B communities at HubSpot, Shopify, and Common Room. She spent nearly five years at HubSpot growing their social media community before moving into senior roles at Shopify and ZoomInfo. At Common Room, she built an events engine from scratch that generated $1M+ in pipeline in a single quarter, earning her a reputation as one of the more results-oriented voices in the community-led growth space.
Ezra Firestone is a self-taught ecommerce entrepreneur who dropped out of high school, played poker in NYC underground clubs, and went on to build and sell multiple 7-, 8-, and 9-figure brands - most notably BOOM by Cindy Joseph, which crossed $200 million in cumulative revenue. He runs Smart Marketer (his education platform), Zipify Apps (serving 18,000+ Shopify brands with $600M+ in facilitated upsell revenue), and has acquired and turned around brands like oVertone Haircare. His philosophy - 'Serve the World Unselfishly and Profit' - is backed by results, and his operating principles around content-first marketing, brand mission, and sustainable growth have influenced an entire generation of ecommerce operators.
Scott Vinkle is a Toronto-based Accessibility Specialist at Shopify with over 12 years of experience making digital products usable for everyone. Holding the IAAP CPWA certification - one of the highest credentials in web accessibility - he co-leads Shopify's accessibility guild, contributes to W3C ARIA standards, speaks at international conferences, and publishes practical accessibility guidance through his newsletter, blog, and Medium. He's the rare specialist who bridges the gap between compliance checkbox and genuine inclusive design.
Lulu Cheng Meservey is the founder and CEO of Rostra, a strategic communications firm that bets on founder-led narratives over legacy PR playbooks. A former VP of Communications at Substack and EVP/CCO at Activision Blizzard, she now sits on Shopify's board of directors and manages a $40 million VC fund. Known for her newsletter 'Flack' (also called 'Res Ipsa') on Substack, she is one of the most incisive voices arguing that the future of tech PR is direct-to-audience, not media-mediated. Her clients have included Anduril, Cognition AI, Coinbase, and Ramp.
Surma (known online as @DasSurma) is a Principal Software Engineer at Shopify focused on developer experience and monorepo architecture. A former Google Chrome Team Web Advocate, he is best known for making WebAssembly and Web Workers approachable through open-source tools like Comlink (12k+ GitHub stars), Squoosh, and PROXX. He co-hosts the 'Off The Main Thread' podcast with Jake Archibald and publishes deep technical articles at surma.dev. Based in Bristol, UK, Surma has spent his career removing the friction between developers and the harder parts of the web platform.
Klaviyo is a Boston-based AI-first B2C CRM platform that unifies email marketing, SMS, push notifications, and customer service into a single data-driven system. Founded in 2012 by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen, it went public on the NYSE in September 2023 and crossed $1.2B in annual revenue in 2025, serving 193,000+ brands in 100 countries. Klaviyo's core edge is its built-in Customer Data Platform that manages 7.3 billion customer profiles and processes 2.5 billion events daily, enabling hyper-personalized marketing at scale for direct-to-consumer brands.