Chord, a headless commerce company established by former Glossier executives, has raised $18 million in funding.
Former Glossier executives Henry Davis and Bryan Mahoney launched Arfa, a new e-commerce company, last year. They are unveiling a new business strategy and a new identity, new financing, and acquisition today.
Second, the name: The New York start-up will now be branded as Chord, which illustrates the reality that the company is now “exclusively based on our technology offering,” rather than introducing its direct-to-consumer products, according to Davis (Chord’s chairman and COO). Davis also mentioned that Chord would be releasing more information about its current labels soon.
According to Mahoney (Chord’s CEO), the platform delivers “commerce as a business” to brands. In other terms, as a company ventures into the realm of headless shopping (where they purchase e-commerce infrastructure independent from the front-end experience), Chord is designed to meet many of their demands through a variety of items and features, including content management, consumer data management, and order management.
“Operators have been pressured to create sacrifices and trade-offs on their core business,” Davis said, citing problems such as inadequate data capacity and highly dynamic, multi-channel companies. As a rule, we want to get rid of it. Your technology stack is here to help.” Founders of the Chord, Henry Davis and Bryan Mahoney, co-founders of Chord,
Though there are many other headless commerce start-ups, Davis claims that “everyone is struggling for the same tactics to achieve the same thing” around the e-commerce world. Rather than bringing another headless approach to access the same resources, we decided to provide you with an exclusive and improved offering.”
Chord’sFor example, Chord’s consumer data portal is something “we bake into all we do,” providing “a single predictive layer” that gathers data around the platform, according to Mahoney.
Yaguara, a Denver-based e-commerce data start-up, was also purchased by the company for an undisclosed amount. The Chord would be willing to “double down” on data and data visualization now that the Yaguara team has joined.
According to Crunchbase, the organization has already received an $18 million Series A, taking its overall investment to $25 million. Eclipse Ventures was the lead investor in the round.
Looking forward, Mahoney said that the company’s goal is to “be recognized as the Stripe of headless commerce” because “we want to power headless commerce” in the same manner as “they have created the infrastructure running payments on the internet.”
