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Investment
We’re excited to welcome Chord, a company that unifies all of a brand’s commerce data and makes it AI-ready so brands can see what’s going on with their metrics — and more importantly why — so that they can make better decisions and maximize growth. The company recently closed on a $5.5 million in seed funding led by M13 with participation from Act One Ventures.
Why we’re excited about Chord
Over the past two years, Chord evolved from a headless commerce platform to a data-driven solution leveraging AI for e-commerce.
After one of Chord’s customers raved about how well the company’s data platform was improving its return on investment, it was the spark for M13 to get to know Bryan Mahoney’s background and understand the importance of what he was building.
Marketers have long relied on misleading data from different sources as well as a long list of software to decipher that data in order to tell them how certain data metrics behave. This can lead to bad recommendations and bad decisions. Brands turned to Chord to get better data and understand it, said M13 partner Brent Murri.
“Marketers are jumping from dashboard to dashboard without knowing which one to trust,” Murri said. “It became clear that Chord’s ability to unify customer data across all of the channels, along with its proprietary modeling and enrichment, is the solution to help marketers understand, make sense of and make decisions with their data.”
Chord’s solution provides a one-stop shop for marketers where they can see all of their metrics — essentially one source of truth — from one dashboard. No longer does a marketer have to use one provider to collect first-party data, another to be the data warehouse provider, and then a handful of other point solutions to tap into that data to yield results so they can make decisions.
When the pandemic hit five years ago, brick-and-mortar stores rushed to elevate their online store presence in hopes of not losing sales while people stayed at home.
One of the startups helping companies with this mission was Chord Commerce. In 2021, the company, which started as Arfa, was selling headless commerce technology, which enabled companies to operate back-end infrastructure without affecting the front-end experience.
Headless commerce was supposed to be big. Hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars were invested into companies, including Chord, to pump up this technology. Ultimately, the headless commerce market didn’t have the anticipated “wiz-bang.”
Data was always part of Chord's DNA; in fact Chord came to market as "headless with a brain" because of the data stack underpinning the infrastructure. In 2023, Chord decided to embrace all platforms with its data product, letting go of the requirement to mandate the use of Chord's headless platform to access it.
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The company is now building an artificial intelligence-driven co-pilot for marketing teams that helps commerce brands make faster, more informed decisions and execute real-time marketing strategies, all within a single platform. The co-pilot will help with hypotheses, understanding trends, providing recommendations and activations into the right channels.
It is also taking the guesswork out of those decisions with a task bar so all the marketer has to do is click a button to increase social media buy of a certain campaign or add another channel to an existing campaign.
“We are giving marketers data superpowers,” Mahoney said. “We are able to serve up insights in a way that is faster, easier and more conversational than ever before, and to go from insight to action with one click. You can ask the Chord co-pilot to find an audience, connect the audience to other sources — while also finding the right sources. So we are bringing the right data together, enriching it the right way and giving you the connective tissue to activate it.”
From hacking PowerPoints to giving Glossier a tech makeover
Mahoney wrote his first e-commerce application in 1997 while in business school in Montreal. It started with a simple PowerPoint presentation that Mahoney and his partner wanted to animate. They had to “hack” the program in order to do it, but the results spoke for themselves. Soon business school colleagues were paying them to animate their presentations.
Mahoney took those skills to a part-time job where one of his customers wanted to build an online store to sell imported furniture.
“Like every entrepreneur, I said, ‘I think you can hire me,’” he said. “We're good at PowerPoint, so we can do an e-commerce site.”
Only, he didn’t know how to do it. He started calling around to see if there was a company that could do it, and Mahoney would manage the process. However, the price he was quoted for that work “blew my mind,” he said.
Mahoney convinced Alex Nemeroff, a friend who still works with him today, to join him in building an e-commerce website. And no, they did not charge $250,000 to the customer. They launched their first site in 1997 and in 1999 started Dynamo, a design and development agency that ran for almost 20 years.
“Dynamo established a reputation of being a go-to company for early stage, venture backed startups interested in consumer tech,” Mahoney said. “Then it became e-commerce, and then direct-to-consumer.”
Toward the tail end of the company, Dynamo worked with brands like Blue Bottle Coffee, Samsung and beauty brand Glossier. That’s when Mahoney met Henry Davis, who had been recently hired as president and chief operating officer at Glossier. His first task? Find an agency to design and develop the first version of Glossier.
“Henry and I had a friend in common, and so he called me,” Mahoney said. “That’s where the relationship with Glossier was born.”
Mahoney started working on the Glossier site in April 2014 and eventually joined the company the next year as its head of technology and later Chief Technology Officer.
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Building Chord
After building and scaling that business, both Mahoney and Davis left to start a company together called Arfa in 2019. This new company would be about creating and launching multiple brands on top of a shared commerce and data stack built from all the lessons they learned at Glossier.
“We had this hypothesis that the next wave, which was direct-to-consumer commerce, wasn’t going to raise as much venture dollars as companies like Glossier,” Mahoney said. “Henry and I wanted to create technology for brands to get to profitability faster, need to raise less money and hire a few people, but ultimately have the same level of access to technology that we had after raising hundreds of millions of dollars.”
By that time it was 2020, and headless commerce was the big thing. So they evolved Arfa into Chord Commerce, which would provide that layer of technology and commerce tools for brands. However, that market didn’t develop the way Mahoney thought it would, he said.
“We did a pretty good job in headless and signed some good customers who are still using our software, but we realized the market was never going to be venture scale,” Mahoney said. “Luckily for us, we had a data product. We saw this new paradigm for how you build a storefront and leverage different APIs.”
So in mid-2023, Chord’s leaders went out to find brands who wanted to buy the data product. Audio technology company Sonos came on board as a customer.
However, as Mahoney put it, everyone was “not all roses.”
“We were running out of the money we had raised,” he said. “We'd raised $35 million and we built a bunch of products. We grew from zero to nearly $3 million in ARR with this new data product in a little over a year.”
The “reset moment”
Instead, he had to recapitalize the company and find new investors. Mahoney describes it as one of the hardest things he has ever had to do. During that time, the company was approached for an acquisition by a big AI company that saw Chord as a solution to messy data silos.
Chord didn’t go down that road but Mahoney did meet M13’s Brent Murri.
“M13 was the first firm I pitched when we went out to raise this round because of their reputation in consumer and data,” Mahoney said.
However, M13 saw potential in what Chord was building, especially around leveraging AI, and proposed that Chord do a seed round instead, Mahoney added.
“Now, I'm out there talking about a recap and a reset, and trying to do it thoughtfully with our investors, who had given us an awful lot of money to get to where we are, but needed to be recalibrated to give Chord another chance,” Mahoney said. “I'm trying to look at this as a reset moment where we can be a fundamentally different company, with a fundamentally different product, built on all of the lessons learned along the way to get here, trying to do that the right way.”
“The AI era is here”
Through that $5.5 million seed, M13 and Act One Ventures are investing in Mahoney, his team and Chord’s infrastructure.
“Chord is starting from the data perspective and then layering in all the powerful tools on top of that,” Murri said. “I believe Bryan is one of the most well respected technologists inside of e-commerce who has built incredible technology for Glossier, Daily Harvest and other e-commerce brands. He is best positioned to deliver accurate, consolidated data that you can build modeling and AI products on top of.”
Mahoney is now working on the next version of Chord’s platform and in the process of testing it with customers.
The data models continue to be specifically trained for commerce because they think the commerce total addressable market “is arguably one of the biggest prizes. or opportunities, in software,” Mahoney said.
In the future, they see access to large language models being commoditized, so the hard part — and what they are working on now — is making sure the LLMs have the right data. The better the data, the better that brands will understand what the right key product indicators to track and the right actions to take from that data.
“It wouldn't have gotten done without M13 taking a chance and Brent being super fair,” Mahoney said. “They are investing in our infrastructure, and we both believe the AI era is here. Chord is an engine for AI readiness.”
Read more about Bryan Mahoney
- Chord connects new funding to predictive commerce metrics so brands can grow
- Ep 58 The Crest: Compounding your learnings and career with Bryan Mahoney (Co-founder and CEO of Chord Commerce)
- Interview with Bryan Mahoney CEO of Chord Commerce on Headless Platforms and API-First technology for ecommerce and DTC
- From Glossier to Chord Commerce: Lessons in Building Enterprise Software for Operators
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanmahoney/
Follow Chord
Investment
We’re excited to welcome Chord, a company that unifies all of a brand’s commerce data and makes it AI-ready so brands can see what’s going on with their metrics — and more importantly why — so that they can make better decisions and maximize growth. The company recently closed on a $5.5 million in seed funding led by M13 with participation from Act One Ventures.
Why we’re excited about Chord
Over the past two years, Chord evolved from a headless commerce platform to a data-driven solution leveraging AI for e-commerce.
After one of Chord’s customers raved about how well the company’s data platform was improving its return on investment, it was the spark for M13 to get to know Bryan Mahoney’s background and understand the importance of what he was building.
Marketers have long relied on misleading data from different sources as well as a long list of software to decipher that data in order to tell them how certain data metrics behave. This can lead to bad recommendations and bad decisions. Brands turned to Chord to get better data and understand it, said M13 partner Brent Murri.
“Marketers are jumping from dashboard to dashboard without knowing which one to trust,” Murri said. “It became clear that Chord’s ability to unify customer data across all of the channels, along with its proprietary modeling and enrichment, is the solution to help marketers understand, make sense of and make decisions with their data.”
Chord’s solution provides a one-stop shop for marketers where they can see all of their metrics — essentially one source of truth — from one dashboard. No longer does a marketer have to use one provider to collect first-party data, another to be the data warehouse provider, and then a handful of other point solutions to tap into that data to yield results so they can make decisions.
When the pandemic hit five years ago, brick-and-mortar stores rushed to elevate their online store presence in hopes of not losing sales while people stayed at home.
One of the startups helping companies with this mission was Chord Commerce. In 2021, the company, which started as Arfa, was selling headless commerce technology, which enabled companies to operate back-end infrastructure without affecting the front-end experience.
Headless commerce was supposed to be big. Hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars were invested into companies, including Chord, to pump up this technology. Ultimately, the headless commerce market didn’t have the anticipated “wiz-bang.”
Data was always part of Chord's DNA; in fact Chord came to market as "headless with a brain" because of the data stack underpinning the infrastructure. In 2023, Chord decided to embrace all platforms with its data product, letting go of the requirement to mandate the use of Chord's headless platform to access it.
The company is now building an artificial intelligence-driven co-pilot for marketing teams that helps commerce brands make faster, more informed decisions and execute real-time marketing strategies, all within a single platform. The co-pilot will help with hypotheses, understanding trends, providing recommendations and activations into the right channels.
It is also taking the guesswork out of those decisions with a task bar so all the marketer has to do is click a button to increase social media buy of a certain campaign or add another channel to an existing campaign.
“We are giving marketers data superpowers,” Mahoney said. “We are able to serve up insights in a way that is faster, easier and more conversational than ever before, and to go from insight to action with one click. You can ask the Chord co-pilot to find an audience, connect the audience to other sources — while also finding the right sources. So we are bringing the right data together, enriching it the right way and giving you the connective tissue to activate it.”
From hacking PowerPoints to giving Glossier a tech makeover
Mahoney wrote his first e-commerce application in 1997 while in business school in Montreal. It started with a simple PowerPoint presentation that Mahoney and his partner wanted to animate. They had to “hack” the program in order to do it, but the results spoke for themselves. Soon business school colleagues were paying them to animate their presentations.
Mahoney took those skills to a part-time job where one of his customers wanted to build an online store to sell imported furniture.
“Like every entrepreneur, I said, ‘I think you can hire me,’” he said. “We're good at PowerPoint, so we can do an e-commerce site.”
Only, he didn’t know how to do it. He started calling around to see if there was a company that could do it, and Mahoney would manage the process. However, the price he was quoted for that work “blew my mind,” he said.
Mahoney convinced Alex Nemeroff, a friend who still works with him today, to join him in building an e-commerce website. And no, they did not charge $250,000 to the customer. They launched their first site in 1997 and in 1999 started Dynamo, a design and development agency that ran for almost 20 years.
“Dynamo established a reputation of being a go-to company for early stage, venture backed startups interested in consumer tech,” Mahoney said. “Then it became e-commerce, and then direct-to-consumer.”
Toward the tail end of the company, Dynamo worked with brands like Blue Bottle Coffee, Samsung and beauty brand Glossier. That’s when Mahoney met Henry Davis, who had been recently hired as president and chief operating officer at Glossier. His first task? Find an agency to design and develop the first version of Glossier.
“Henry and I had a friend in common, and so he called me,” Mahoney said. “That’s where the relationship with Glossier was born.”
Mahoney started working on the Glossier site in April 2014 and eventually joined the company the next year as its head of technology and later Chief Technology Officer.
Building Chord
After building and scaling that business, both Mahoney and Davis left to start a company together called Arfa in 2019. This new company would be about creating and launching multiple brands on top of a shared commerce and data stack built from all the lessons they learned at Glossier.
“We had this hypothesis that the next wave, which was direct-to-consumer commerce, wasn’t going to raise as much venture dollars as companies like Glossier,” Mahoney said. “Henry and I wanted to create technology for brands to get to profitability faster, need to raise less money and hire a few people, but ultimately have the same level of access to technology that we had after raising hundreds of millions of dollars.”
By that time it was 2020, and headless commerce was the big thing. So they evolved Arfa into Chord Commerce, which would provide that layer of technology and commerce tools for brands. However, that market didn’t develop the way Mahoney thought it would, he said.
“We did a pretty good job in headless and signed some good customers who are still using our software, but we realized the market was never going to be venture scale,” Mahoney said. “Luckily for us, we had a data product. We saw this new paradigm for how you build a storefront and leverage different APIs.”
So in mid-2023, Chord’s leaders went out to find brands who wanted to buy the data product. Audio technology company Sonos came on board as a customer.
However, as Mahoney put it, everyone was “not all roses.”
“We were running out of the money we had raised,” he said. “We'd raised $35 million and we built a bunch of products. We grew from zero to nearly $3 million in ARR with this new data product in a little over a year.”
The “reset moment”
Instead, he had to recapitalize the company and find new investors. Mahoney describes it as one of the hardest things he has ever had to do. During that time, the company was approached for an acquisition by a big AI company that saw Chord as a solution to messy data silos.
Chord didn’t go down that road but Mahoney did meet M13’s Brent Murri.
“M13 was the first firm I pitched when we went out to raise this round because of their reputation in consumer and data,” Mahoney said.
However, M13 saw potential in what Chord was building, especially around leveraging AI, and proposed that Chord do a seed round instead, Mahoney added.
“Now, I'm out there talking about a recap and a reset, and trying to do it thoughtfully with our investors, who had given us an awful lot of money to get to where we are, but needed to be recalibrated to give Chord another chance,” Mahoney said. “I'm trying to look at this as a reset moment where we can be a fundamentally different company, with a fundamentally different product, built on all of the lessons learned along the way to get here, trying to do that the right way.”
“The AI era is here”
Through that $5.5 million seed, M13 and Act One Ventures are investing in Mahoney, his team and Chord’s infrastructure.
“Chord is starting from the data perspective and then layering in all the powerful tools on top of that,” Murri said. “I believe Bryan is one of the most well respected technologists inside of e-commerce who has built incredible technology for Glossier, Daily Harvest and other e-commerce brands. He is best positioned to deliver accurate, consolidated data that you can build modeling and AI products on top of.”
Mahoney is now working on the next version of Chord’s platform and in the process of testing it with customers.
The data models continue to be specifically trained for commerce because they think the commerce total addressable market “is arguably one of the biggest prizes. or opportunities, in software,” Mahoney said.
In the future, they see access to large language models being commoditized, so the hard part — and what they are working on now — is making sure the LLMs have the right data. The better the data, the better that brands will understand what the right key product indicators to track and the right actions to take from that data.
“It wouldn't have gotten done without M13 taking a chance and Brent being super fair,” Mahoney said. “They are investing in our infrastructure, and we both believe the AI era is here. Chord is an engine for AI readiness.”
Read more about Bryan Mahoney
- Chord connects new funding to predictive commerce metrics so brands can grow
- Ep 58 The Crest: Compounding your learnings and career with Bryan Mahoney (Co-founder and CEO of Chord Commerce)
- Interview with Bryan Mahoney CEO of Chord Commerce on Headless Platforms and API-First technology for ecommerce and DTC
- From Glossier to Chord Commerce: Lessons in Building Enterprise Software for Operators
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanmahoney/
Follow Chord
Read more
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