Fermat Commerce, a distributed commerce company, announced the launch of its product that lets brands sell to consumers directly through influencer content. The company also announced it raised $12M in seed funding from Greylock and QED Investors, with participation from Courtside Ventures and a handful of angel investors.
Founded by ad tech execs from LiveRamp, Fermat helps brands and influencers thrive in today’s challenging e-commerce ecosystem. When Apple made big privacy changes in 2021 that required developers to seek permission to track users and consumers to allow tracking across apps and websites, Rishabh Jain (CEO) and Shreyas Kumar (CTO) knew the changes would impact how DTC brands approach growth, and ultimately increase the cost of advertising. On the flip side, they also saw how social media and the influencer industry was becoming an increasingly powerful tool for e-commerce.
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“Today, the cost for D2C brands to run ads on platforms like Instagram can be 3X what it was in 2021. Given this, brands have turned to ways to create direct engagement with consumers in content, leveraging social and influencers to help reach customers,” said Rishabh Jain, CEO of Fermat. “We founded Fermat because we saw an opportunity to build new technology that could let brands reduce their reliance on big tech platforms to engage consumers, while continuing to support the wave of influencer and social-driven commerce.”
Fermat helps brands easily embed shopping experiences in influencer content, so an influencer’s audience has a native, engaging shopping experience.
For brands, Fermat lets them simply and effectively share their products with influencers to create shopping experiences. The brands can manage the full workflow in Fermat’s system, all while having the order be written directly to the brand as a 1st party interaction that allows for ongoing marketing. Specifically, brands can license products based on the partner, create unique payout structures per partner, and have 100% closed loop attribution on each partner’s impressions and sales.
For influencers, Fermat offers simple no-code tools so they can build an immersive, native shopping experience with brand collaborators, all while keeping their audience engaged with them in their own social media content. Specifically, influencers can embed the shopping experience in social or on their own site, and see how effectively they are driving sales with high clarity analytics.
“Every time we open social media apps, it’s becoming increasing clear that influencers are a powerful tool for brands. In fact, creator commerce is growing 3X faster than e-commerce today,” said Saam Motamedi, partner at Greylock. “With deep experience in ad tech, Rishabh and Shreyas are the right pair to help brands and influencers leverage this new future of commerce, and I look forward to working with them as they scale the company.”
“We believe the emergence of a distributed and affinity-driven commerce enablement product like Fermat is inevitable to power purchase discovery, and we are excited to back the team on the journey.” said Victoria Zuo, Principal at QED Investors.
For the last few months, Fermat has been in private alpha, working with dozens of brands and hundreds of influencers to quietly increase their transaction volume. Starting today, Fermat is available to any brand on Shopify.