One of the big leaders in buying up and scaling third-party merchants selling on Amazon and other marketplace platforms is announcing a major round of funding today as it continues to expand its ambitions. Thrasio, the Boston-based startup, has closed an all-equity Series D of over $1 billion — a huge infusion in cash that it will be using to continue buying up more companies as well as to expand internationally. It said that it’s currently on a rate of buying 1.5 businesses per week and now has some 200 brands in its portfolio.

Silver Lake and Advent International led the round, with Advent remaining the company’s largest shareholder. Upper90, funds managed by Oaktree Capital Management, L.P., PEAK6 Investments and Corner Capital — all previous backers — were also in the round.

Thrasio has confirmed to me that the valuation is between $5 billion and $10 billion but declined to get more specific. As a marker of where it was prior to this round, in April of this year, when it raised $100 million, Thrasio was valued at $3.7 billion. Just on a straight added-capital basis that would put its valuation at close to $5 billion but the company also notes that it has been seeing accelerated growth — the number of brands under its wing has doubled since then to 200 — so very likely some ways higher than that. Current brands include Angry Orange pet deodorizers and stain removers, SafeRest mattress protectors and ThisWorx car cleaning and detailing products.

The company, founded in 2018, has now raised $3.4 billion, including a $650 million debt round earlier this year.

Thrasio is one of the pioneers of the modern “roll up” player, and its traction, along with the wider opportunity in the market, have spawned dozens of other startups around the world building businesses replicating its model that have collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars in equity and debt to build out their businesses. Other recent fundings in the space have included Heroes, which raised $200 million in August; Olsam ($165 million); Suma Brands ($150 million); Elevate Brands ($250 million); Perch ($775 million); factory14 ($200 million); as well as Heyday, The Razor Group, Branded, SellerX, Berlin Brands Group (X2), Benitago, Latin America’s Valoreo and Rainforest and Una Brands out of Asia.

One of the reasons it has raised so much in this round is to better target that global opportunity. Thrasio already has operations in the UK, Germany China and Japan and the plan is to expand that further, both as a means of finding more companies to gobble up, but also to expand its wider supply chain.

That wider opportunity, meanwhile, remains a large one despite how crowded the market is getting. By various estimates there are between 5 million and 10 million third-party merchants selling on Amazon alone, leveraging the e-commerce giant’s giant audience of shoppers and its Fulfillment by Amazon platform for delivery and other distribution logistics to cut down the operational costs and inefficiencies of building a direct-to-consumer business from the ground up. Thrasio’s co-CEO and co-founder Josh Silberstein told me earlier this year that Thrasio estimates that there are around 50,000 businesses out of those that make more than $1 million in revenues annually, so the tail of what is out there in terms of size is very long.

Thrasio is building out a bigger economy of scale play around that basic model, and in some cases replacing some of the Amazon components with scale of its own, which — the theory goes — only improves as it grows. That includes sourcing for products (as well as wider supply chain challenges), analytics both to source the more interesting companies to buy up as well as to market those products once under the Thrasio wing, even its own fulfillment technology. It is also increasingly also looking at opportunities to build sales and customer relationships outside of the Amazon ecosystem, using other marketplaces, other sales channels and in some cases direct-to-consumer plays.

(And that analytics engine for sourcing potential acquisitions is working hard: Thrasio says that it has “evaluated” some 6,000 businesses overall.)

“Our business is getting better as it gets bigger, and these investments will be invaluable as we continue on that path,” said Carlos Cashman, the other co-founder and CEO of Thrasio, in a statement. “Advent and Silver Lake both have phenomenal track records of building successful global businesses, and the additional funds from existing investors including Upper90 and PEAK6 are extremely rewarding votes of confidence in a crowded space.”

“Thrasio created the Amazon aggregator category, and their innovative approach and impressive growth have brought a lot of attention to this space,” said Greg Mondre, co-CEO, and Stephen Evans, managing director, of Silver Lake, in a joint statement. “We believe Carlos Cashman and his team are well positioned to accelerate their growth and build the preeminent next-generation, technology-driven consumer goods company. We’re excited to partner with Carlos, his team and the existing shareholders as the company enters the next phase of growth.”

“Thrasio has quickly established itself as the largest ecommerce aggregator globally, and we are thrilled to strengthen our partnership with Carlos and his team, in addition to welcoming Silver Lake as a new investor,” added David Mussafer, chairman and managing partner and Jeff Case, managing director, of Advent International. “Thrasio is well positioned for further success, and we look forward to working with the company as it continues to scale.”

It’s hard to build a publishing empire, and it’s just as easy to lose one. Newspaper magnates were mostly replaced by broadcast moguls, first radio and then TV and cable, and now of course, they are all fighting against the social media tycoons and streaming impresarios who want to capture our attention. Each generation of media titans dies off and is replaced, just as each medium finds its niche only to be supplanted by something novel.

So when it comes to Automattic, the leading commercial complement to the open-source WordPress publishing platform, time and longevity have a rather peculiar meaning in an industry littered with the gravestones of media sites of yore. Founded in 2005, the company continues to assiduously evolve and expand as it staves off that ambient and inclement sense of doom that pervades media.

Sixteen years in and now valued at $7.5 billion, Automattic has found a multitude of strides, even as it strives to own ever more of the media market. It’s a publisher, a social media network via its acquisition of Tumblr, an e-commerce giant with WooCommerce, a productivity tool with P2, and more. It reached this peak doing pretty much everything wrong, according to VCs, a strategy, as we will see, that proved to be exponentially effective in the long run.

The lead writer for this TC-1 (our slightly rechristened EC-1 to match our TechCrunch+ rebrand) is Chris Morrison. Chris has been among our most productive analysts of breakthrough companies, profiling Roblox and Klaviyo in previous entries of this series. In addition to writing and analyzing, he’s an independent game developer and brings his expertise in business development and engineering to bear in understanding Automattic and its open source focus. The lead editor for this package was Danny Crichton, the assistant editor was Ram Iyer, the copy editor was Richard Dal Porto and illustrations were created by Nigel Sussman.

Morrison has no financial ties to Automattic or other conflicts of interest to disclose.

The Automattic TC-1 comprises four main articles numbering 10,700 words and a reading time of about 40 minutes. Let’s take a look:

• Part 1: Origin story “How doing everything wrong turned Automattic into a multibillion dollar media powerhouse” (3,850 words/15 minutes) — explores the formation of Automattic in the wake of the success of the WordPress project and how a 21-year-old jazz saxophonist with a side hobby in publishing became a media magnate.
• Part 2: Open source development “There’s nothing Automattic about balancing commercial growth with an open source developer community” (2,500 words/10 minutes) — investigates the tensions inherent in being a commercial backer of an open source project, and how Automattic balances pushing the community forward while allowing contributors to participate in the project.
• Part 3: Acquisitions and future strategy “Can social and e-commerce transform the future of the open web?” (2,350 words/9 minutes) — analyzes Automattic’s long history of acquisitions and expansions by surveying the company’s initiatives in e-commerce and social media, two competitive verticals upon which its future success will be built.
• Part 4: Remote work culture “The future of remote work is text” (2,000 words/8 minutes) — reports on the development of Automattic’s unique corporate culture, which was remote years before the corporate tech world was ready for work from home, and how the company centralizes communications around text.

We’re always iterating on the TC-1 format. If you have questions, comments or ideas, please send an email to TechCrunch Managing Editor Danny Crichton at danny@techcrunch.com.

Nothing has been automatic about the success of Automattic.

Today, to those who haven’t been paying attention, the company looks a bit like an overnight success story. WordPress, the open source software behind the company, is now estimated to power roughly 42% of all websites on the internet. Automattic’s e-commerce plugin, WooCommerce, which it purchased in 2015, is believed to run more than a quarter of all online storefronts.

The company has 1,700 employees in a distributed, asynchronous, global workforce, and has raised nearly $1 billion, according to Crunchbase, most recently at a $7.5 billion valuation.

Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg at TechCrunch Disrupt 2014. Image Credits: TechCrunch

But reaching this point has taken 16 years — or 18, if you count from the founding of WordPress. And over those many years, the company did pretty much everything wrong, if you ask the venture capitalists.

Automattic focused on media at a time when that industry was being demolished by the internet. It eschewed the kinds of walled gardens that turned Facebook, Apple and Google into monopolistic powerhouses and built its business on top of a volunteer-run, open source infrastructure that gave many investors serious pause.

Its workforce has always been fully remote and distributed — 16 years before last year’s pandemic spread that model throughout the corporate world. Automattic’s founder, Matt Mullenweg, was barely of American legal drinking age (21) when he began building, at a time when venture capitalists wanted “adult supervision” at their companies.

But in retrospect, doing everything wrong was exactly the right strategy — a fact that’s just now becoming apparent.

“With exponential growth, things look small until the end,” says Mullenweg. In his reckoning, Automattic isn’t yet close to the end, but the curve is starting to become visible.

It all began with a blog post.

The jazz saxophonist who started a weblog revolution

Massive changes often begin as ephemeral, uncertain ideas. The technology is unstable and experimental; the audience unclear; and the commercial applications murky or completely unknown.

Back in 2003, that was the context for the so-called weblog, which would shortly be elided to blog. Blogger had just sold itself to Google — for an undisclosed and presumably small price. The year before, political bloggers at Instapundit and Talking Points Memo had shaken up American politics when they managed to intensify attention on a story about Trent Lott, forcing his resignation as the minority leader in the U.S. Senate. Yet, traditional media remained the undisputed king of communication, and the era of professional blogs (including the one you’re reading) was still a distant dream.

One early adopter was Matt Mullenweg, a 19-year-old jazz enthusiast in Texas. In a blog post that’s still online, he wrote:

My logging software hasn’t been updated for months, and the main developer has disappeared, and I can only hope that he’s okay.

What to do?

Mullenweg himself didn’t necessarily look like the person to come up with a solution. His interests were eclectic and wide-ranging — while he imagined himself as a future jazz saxophonist, he was also studying political science at the University of Houston, and spent a good deal of his time working on his photography (to this day, Mullenweg’s Twitter handle is @photomatt). His tech hobbies, including open source software, were inspired by his father’s job as a professional programmer, but Mullenweg didn’t yet seem certain about following his father’s profession.

Nevertheless, his post got the attention of a few other developers and the group set out to create the open source WordPress project, focused on blog publishing. The first version of WordPress was released in May 2003 and became the official version of b2, an older project that had been abandoned.

Mullenweg became the center point of a growing community. An October 2004 Houston Press profile of him noted that WordPress was running more than 29,000 blogs. Mullenweg’s own blog was the third most popular in the world, and all the attention he received resulted in an offer to leave college and become a senior product manager at CNET, a San Francisco media company. WordPress, though, was still referred to as a “hobby.”

The good side of spam

CNET turned out to be the perfect employer. The company’s job offer allowed Mullenweg to spend 20% of his time working on WordPress and also let him retain ownership of source code he wrote while at the company. The role also gave him an inside view of the internal systems of a large media organization.

It’s impossible to talk about Automattic without talking about remote work. The company is a role model and innovator in this area: It has been entirely remote since 2005, and at 1,700 employees, it has helped prove that a remote workplace culture can succeed at scale.

But “remote” has taken on a different meaning than it denoted two years ago. Since COVID-19 began, companies that never planned on working remotely have moved millions of employees online. Zoom’s video meeting minutes grew 30x as employers made a mad dash to replicate physical offices within virtual meeting rooms. Initial studies have shown that productivity declined as a result.

Perhaps that’s why Automattic rejects the word “remote” entirely. Instead, its leaders use words like “distributed” and “asynchronous.” There is no online analogue to an office; indeed, Automattic doesn’t even require that employees know what each other’s faces look like.

At its most basic level, Automattic’s model isn’t about remote work at all. Instead, it’s about how the company is structured, from its management, to its communication style, right down to its hiring process.

No more meetings

I got a peek into just how different Automattic is from ordinary companies while scheduling one of the interviews for this article. Usually, finding a good time with interviewees involves hunting through a packed schedule for the few morsels of time available. A busy executive might have two or three openings during a week with every other slot filled.

Instead, when Monica Ohara, chief marketing officer of WordPress.com, sent me her Calendly link, I saw a wide open schedule. Ohara, by all appearances, wasn’t doing much work. When I asked about it, she laughed.

“It’s the thing I think is really broken with normal office work,” she said. “Your meeting calendar was a badge of honor and having so many meetings meant you were so important. That’s not a paradigm here.”

Instead, most communication is written and asynchronous — meaning that it can be addressed anytime during the work day.

A CMS for a CMS company

Automattic’s replacement for meetings and most office collaboration is P2, a modification of WordPress that it announced in August 2020 at the height of the pandemic and offers as a paid service.

A P2 post looks more or less like a blog post, with threaded discussions, the ability to follow replies and a Like button. Whenever employees want to discuss anything with distant colleagues — for instance, a coder in the United States who wants to share something with a designer in South Africa who’s asleep at the time — they can write about it on the company’s P2 instance. Anyone else who is potentially interested can find the same post with a search or through various discovery features built into the platform.

Automattic CFO Mark Davies. Image Credits: Automattic

Documentation is the order of the day, up to and including information that would be hidden at other companies.

“You need to be extremely transparent. Matt [Mullenweg, Automattic’s founder and CEO] posts what he’s working on. I post what I’m working on,” said Mark Davies, Automattic’s CFO, who previously worked at smart home platform Vivint, which operated as a much more traditional company. “When I came here for the first time, I had a board meeting, and I said, ‘Let’s get to work.’ They said, ‘No way, you need to post the board deck and what the decisions were.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!.’”

P2 isn’t the only communication method at Automattic — the company also uses software like Slack and Jira. Nonetheless, all the company’s tools share a common thread of asynchronicity: You have colleagues across the world, so don’t expect an immediate reply.

“You’d think that things could move slower here, but they really don’t. I think in offices, there’s also this perception that you have to be in-person. People are saving things up for their one-on-one or meeting when they could have sent an email,” said Ohara. “Here, I’ll often wake up and find out there’s lots happening in Europe that I need to catch up on versus us having to wait a week or two to get a conference room.”

Documenting everything and allowing employees to consume only what they need saves time. “I spend a lot more time communicating and a lot less time listening and sitting in reviews,” said Davies.

When the Trump administration announced it would ban TikTok in the U.S., a number of alternative short-form video apps began to flourish, as users hedged their bets on a potential TikTok exit. Among these was Byte, an app co-created by Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann, which topped 1.3 million downloads in its first week alone. But when Trump’s ban on TikTok failed, Byte sold to rival Clash — an admission of sorts that TikTok’s momentum couldn’t be beaten. Now, new owner Clash is kicking off round two. It’s relaunching its app with the “best of Byte” under the hood alongside a suite of creator tools for monetizing a fan base.

This time, the focus isn’t on beating TikTok, but working in parallel alongside it.

Clash was founded by Brendon McNerney, a former Vine star who at one point grew his own social following on the now-shuttered app to over 700,000 followers. As someone who worked directly in the creator space, McNerney believes he could offer a unique perspective on creator monetization — something even leading apps can still struggle with today.

The newly rebuilt Clash’s premise is that it can help creators identify, engage and monetize their strongest and most loyal fans.

To do so, Clash is introducing a set of tools for creators and their fans, including a virtual tipping mechanism called Drops (not to be confused with product drops, popular in e-commerce) and a custom messaging system called Fanmail, for starters.

Image Credits: Clash

The idea is that creators could grow their overall fanbase by using larger platforms like Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, where they can monetize the crowd through various methods, like advertising revenue share, brand sponsorships and other more direct methods, when available, like tips and subscriptions. Meanwhile, Clash could serve as the backchannel for the fans who are more invested in the creator’s journey — like those who are willing to help fund a creator’s work, similar to Patreon, or those who want a closer relationship with their favorite creators than they would otherwise be able to achieve elsewhere.

McNerney says large platforms, like TikTok, can limit creators’ monetization potential.

“TikTok is a virality machine. It just creates new creators every day — an issue because there’s only so many ad dollars…there’s only so many dollars in the Creator Fund,” he says.

The founder took inspiration from what was working well in other industries, like Twitch with live content, OnlyFans for adult content and Patreon for more project-based work, like podcasts.

Image Credits: Clash

“The thing that really stuck out was, in 2019, I started seeing creators post their Venmo links in their bio. It was kind of a head-scratch moment,” McNerney says. He began to think about how those link-in-bio systems could be turned into more of a product. “And so we really started from the question…if Patreon was built now, what would it look like? And then: how can we do what we know well — which is short-form video?” he continues. “We really wanted to build a short-form video platform, where the video was just the medium, but the whole point of the platform was to support your favorite creators and connect with your fans.”

The initial beta version of Clash launched last summer on the App Store. Soon, the team found creators wanted to use it as a more authentic place to engage with fans outside of larger platforms. Creators wanted to create content specifically designed for the top 10-15% of their fan base — people who were already supporting them in other ways, like buying their merchandise, for example.

This led to the launch of Clash’s first product, Fanmail, where fans could pay to unlock the ability to send personalized messages to top creators, who acknowledge them and respond directly.

It also introduced Drops, a digital good purchased from the App Store that fans can use as a token of appreciation or for access to send Fanmail.

Image Credits: Clash

Creators can redeem Drops at 2,500 (or $25), Clash says. This is a lower threshold than some creator platforms, like Twitch, where you need to have earned $100 to cash out. Clash says it will also seed its network by gifting hundreds of Drops to new users, free of charge. And, for the time being, Clash will not take a cut of these sales — meaning creators keep 100% of the revenue from the Drops they receive. (The company hasn’t yet decided what percentage it will take when the promotional period ends sometime next year.)

McNerney envisions how Clash can be used in the early stages of content creation and planning, which makes it more symbiotic with larger platforms, like TikTok, instead of a direct competitor. For example, one of Clash’s launch creators, Yasmine Sahid, who makes comedic videos on TikTok, is using Clash to fund her other passion: making music. She’s been building her first music video with the support of fans on Clash, who are funding it through their Drops. And as the video is produced, these fans get access to the behind-the-scenes content and other sneak peeks.

Plus, he argues, innovations in creator monetization may need to take place outside of larger platforms.

“The biggest issue, I think, is while [these large platforms] are experimenting with these tools, they’re not leaning into them. At the end of the day, their revenue is 98, 99% from advertising revenue,” he says. “The model that they see themselves leaning into is just strictly focusing on keeping eyeballs glued to the screen. Whereas, they’re improving their algorithms — they want people viewing — we actually want people engaging,” McNerney adds.

Image Credits: Clash

At launch, Clash’s app has been rebuilt to handle future scale and to support monetization tools. Meanwhile, Clash is including what the team loved about Byte, including the way Byte’s Camera worked, the in-app feed and the app’s Discovery page. There are other similarities between Byte’s design and the new app, as well.

And while Clash will gain access to Byte’s existing registered user base of 5 million when it relaunches in Byte’s place on the app stores, it plans to support a variety of creators — not just the young Gen Z’ers who used to try to “bully the millennials” off the original Byte app.

In the near-term, Clash plans to add something called a “fan score” based on their engagement in the app, including entering chats and commenting on videos. It plans to release this feature soon after the public debut.

Of course, even as a platform for the most loyal fans, Clash will have its competition from startups and big tech alike. Twitter has built Super Follow to cater to creators while Instagram has been spotted working on its own fan subscription product in recent days.

Co-founded by P.J. Leimgruber, who previously founded influencer agency NeoReach, LA-based Clash is now a team of 17 full-time. Many early employees have backgrounds in social and creator platforms, including Facebook, TikTok, Vine, Snap, Twitter, Google, Pinterest and Cameo. Vine’s/Twitter’s head of Creator Development, Karyn Spencer, is also Clash’s creator advisor. Byte and Vine co-founder Dom Hoffman remains an advisor.

Ahead of its relaunch, Clash raised $9.1 million in funding over three rounds. The latest was a seed round led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s new fund Seven Seven Six. Other investors in Clash include M13 Ventures, Plug and Play, ACME Capital, and angels Jesse Leimgruber (NeoReach co-founder) and NBA Players, Austin Rivers and Seth Curry.

Clash is relaunching today under Byte’s listing on the App Store and on Google Play.

The founders of Upmesh were building a game on top of Twitch’s API when they realized something about another group of livestreamers. Even though selling through Facebook Live has been gaining popularity in Southeast Asia for years, many vendors are still going through their comments afterward and using pen-and-paper to collect orders. Upmesh was created to automate the checkout process and ultimately wants to create a platform similar to Whatnot where people can discover new live commerce sellers across different social media platforms.

Upmesh announced today it has closed a seed round of $3 million, led by Leo Capital, with participation from Beenext, iSeed, Goto Financial head of merchant financial services Jonathan Barki, BukuWarung founders Abhinay Peddisetty and Chinmay Chauhan, and Zopim founders Royston Tay and Kwok Yangbin.

Upmesh was launched nine months ago by Wong Zi Yang, Soh Jan, Nhat Vu and Shawn Teow, and is now used by almost 300 live commerce merchants in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. The startup says it processes annualized gross merchandise value of $40 million.

The platform’s tools provide e-commerce functions that automatically capture orders made in livestream comments (for example “white top +1”), matches it to the right item in a seller’s inventory and sends a checkout link to the customer. Upmesh currently works with Facebook Live, but will add other platforms, too, with the goal of becoming platform-agnostic.

Other companies that provide order-capturing tools for live commerce include CommentSold, Dibsly, Soldie and Buy It Live, but Upmesh’s founders say one of its most important differentiators is tailoring its platform to meet the expectations of sellers and customers in different Southeast Asian countries.

“If you look at the live selling climate in Southeast Asia, the way people are collecting orders between each country is very different,” said chief executive officer Wong. “Between Singapore and the Philippines, whether you key-in your inventory before or after your live really different, even whether people maintain stock counts is really different.”

Upmesh’s tool for collecting orders through Facebook Live comments

For example, he said in Singapore, inventory turnaround is usually very fast, which means even sellers who offer 1,000s of items only keep stock on the shelf for short periods of time. In the Philippines, however, many vendors do live commerce to supplement their brick-and-mortar shops. Inventory is often taken from their stores and they sell what they have on hand. “The way the software is structured has to be very customized to the individual markets,” Wong said.

Upmesh will use part of its new funding to double down on the Philippines and Malaysia for at least another six months, but it also wants to enter Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. The company plans to increase its headcount, launch marketing campaigns and create educational content for sellers.

Wong notes that even though COVID-19 drove adoption of e-commerce, it isn’t what created interest in live commerce. Many of its clients have been livestreaming for about three years. “The way that people interact with e-commerce is changing. It’s becoming more relationship driven. In fact, our sellers actually know their buyers on a first name basis, so they can call them out by name when they join their livestream,” said Wong. “It’s actually replacing advertising for small business.”

Most of Upmesh’s user acquisition so far has been through word-of-mouth, and it serves a lot of fashion live sellers, since they are a closely-knit community, said Wong.

Upmesh’s future plans revolve around turning those communities into new ways of making money, creating a platform that will let sellers and buyers interact with each other and discover live commerce videos on different social media platforms.

“If we look at an interesting comparison to the U.S., the U.S. has live commerce platforms like Whatnot, but Whatnot is focused on collectibles and vintage items, things that have a very strong secondary reseller market,” said Wong. “In the U.S., those verticals have the most amount of community, people who are talking to each other on eBay, on YouTube or offline, and they look those communities and gave them a home to be in.”

Upmesh’s dashboard for live commerce sellers

Southeast Asia, on the other hand, does not have a similar collectibles market, but communities spring up around different types of goods, like fashion or fresh foods. Those are the kinds of verticals that Upmesh wants to add to its platform.

“That’s the end game for live commerce, that you can discover and interact with different sellers and then once you find a seller you like, you can go deeper,” said Wong. “We direct users’ attention to where they goods are, and since we have the inventory of all our sellers, if you want a red dress, we can tell you which sellers have a red dress.”

Marc Lore, who earlier this year stepped down from his role as Walmart’s head of U.S. e-commerce, is now backing a new startup in the e-commerce space called Wizard. Lore has taken on the roles of co-founder, chairman of the board and investor in Wizard, a B2B startup in the “conversational commerce” space which believes the future of mobile commerce will take place over text. Ahead of its official launch, Wizard today is announcing its $50 million Series A, led by NEA’s Tony Florence.

Both Lore and Accel also participated in the round. Florence, Lore and Accel’s Sameer Gandhi have board seats alongside Wizard’s co-founder and CEO Melissa Bridgeford.

The startup has an interesting founding story, as it’s not quite as new as it would have you believe.

Bridgeford, who once left a finance career in New York, founded and ran Austin-based Stylelust, a text-based shopping platform that aimed to offer a shopping assistant for consumers. Its users could text screenshots and photos and be served recommendations of products they could then buy over text, without visiting a website. Stylelust took advantage of AI and image recognition capabilities to help provide consumers with options of what to buy. There was also a B2B component to Stylelust, which promised brands a “one-text checkout” experience. According to a cached version of its website, the company touted a 35% conversion rate — or 10x higher performance than web-based commerce.

Wizard says it “acquired” Stylelust, but the entire team (minus a few new C-Suite hires in September), are all prior Stylelust employees. Wizard did not have a product in the market at the time of the acquisition.

Technically speaking, it’s a brand-new company — and one that now has the ability to lean on Lore’s experience in e-commerce as well as that of top-tier investors.

Bridgeford described Wizard as an opportunity “to build our vision on a much larger scale and to partner with Marc, who’s really a tremendous visionary in retail tech and really a proven founder and a proven operator.”

“We really share the vision that conversational commerce is the future of retail,” Bridgeford adds.

The company isn’t yet willing to talk in detail about its product, however. Instead, it describes the B2B service as one that will enable brands and retailers to transact with consumers over text. The service is positioned as “an end-to-end shopping experience” on mobile from opt-in to search to payments and shipping and even reorders.

These text-based chats won’t feel like the annoying interactions you may have had with messaging app chatbots in the past, Bridgeford claims.

“What we’ve found is a combination of automation and human touch really provides the optimal experience for users, while also building a powerful technology on the backend that’s built to scale. That’s really where the Holy Grail is,” she explains. “And that’s really what we see for the future of conversational commerce…we’re incorporating chat abilities, natural language processing — all of those technologies are moving very quickly.”

In other words, the frustrating experience you may have had with a chatbot a year or two ago, may not be the experience you would have today.

“The goal of the technology is to make it seem like you are speaking with a human, when it’s really technology-enabled,” Bridgeford adds.

Stylelust also brought its brand relationships to Wizard as part of the deal.

An earlier version of the Stylelust website listed clients including Laughing Glass Cocktails, Desolas Mezcal, Pinhook Bourbon, Marsh House Rum and Neft Vodkas. A focus on wine and sports retail was also mentioned in an Austin Biz Journal feature. However, a write-up about Florida Funders’ backing of Stylust in 2020 noted relationships with top-tier retailers like Neiman Marcus, Walmart, Sephora and Allbirds.

It’s unclear which relationships will continue with Wizard or whether it will continue to focus on the alcohol brands or other retailers, as the company declined to discuss any details related to its business beyond the funding.

The startup plans to use the funds to hire in areas like AI, machine learning and natural language processing, as well as in non-tech roles, like sales, finance and operations. One of the key hires it’s still looking to make is a chief people officer. Though the current team is working in offices based in both New York and Austin, Wizard is hiring nationwide to fill roles on its remote tech team, it says.

Wizard already has some competitors whose services address certain aspects of its business, particularly in the text marketing space. But more broadly, there are other ways that consumers interact with brands over messaging which could evolve into more fully formed products over time, too. Today, consumers often discover products on social media, like Facebook and Instagram, then turn to Messenger or DMs for product questions. WhatsApp is building out a product catalog for businesses that enables consumers to discover products and services directly in the app. Even Apple entered the market with Business Chat, which already allows for purchases made through iMessage chats.

Wizard’s focus on SMS instead of requiring a dedicated messaging app or, say, an iPhone with iMessage, for instance, could help it to differentiate from competitors. Still, betting on SMS — increasingly a home to text-based spam and scams — is a riskier bet. But it’s one Lore is willing to make.

“Having spent most of my career so far in e-commerce, it’s been clear that conversational commerce is the future of retail,” said Lore. “With deep learning becoming more pervasive, the ability to create a hyper-personalized, conversational shopping experience is going to transform how people shop — and I’m confident that what Melissa and the team at Wizard are building will lead that transformation.”

Many e-commerce businesses run their entire order fulfillment process in-house because outsourcing it can be expensive. But the COVID-19 pandemic has supercharged many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as consumers switched to home deliveries and ‘digitized’ their lifestyles to a far greater extent. It means this surge in e-commerce sales is subsequently leading to a boom in warehousing and shipping.

It would seem then that Huboo was virtually tailor-made for the post-pandemic era. It has a full-stack, software-driven e-commerce warehousing and fulfillment system that is turning out to be a boon to these e-commerce-driven SMBs.

It’s now closed a £60 million ($81.4m) Series B financing led by US-based Mubadala Capital. The round was joined by existing investors including Stride, Ada Ventures, Hearst, Episode 1 and Maersk Growth, and takes Huboo’s total funding raised to nearly £80 million since April 2019, after its £14 million Series A funding, raised last year.
 
Founded in 2017 by Martin Bysh and Paul Dodd out of one warehouse in Bristol, the company now has four fulfilment centres across the UK, a site in the Netherlands, and has plans to roll out across other European markets. Each center is split into a ‘micro-hub’ of a few hundred square foot enabling staff to pick and pack inventory more efficiently. It says it has over 1,000 customers, small and large.

The company’s merchant platform uses APIs to integrate with popular sales channels and online marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, and Shopify. These allow D2C brands to view and track orders and manage their inventory on a dashboard. It also has proprietary software to manage warehouse operations.

Martin Bysh, co-founder and CEO of Huboo, said: “Scores of new and existing retail businesses now see their future in e-commerce, but while anyone can set up an online store-front and start selling within hours, the infrastructure powering e-commerce is alarmingly outdated, inefficient, inflexible and expensive.”
 
He said this hub model addresses this: “It brings flexibility and affordability to the incredibly complex fulfilment piece so that online retailers of all sizes – from part-timers to fast-growth D2C leaders – can benefit.”

Over a call, he added: “We win clients from Amazon’s ‘Fulfilled By Amazon’ (FBA) because part of the 20% that the seller pays to Amazon goes to cross-subsidize the inexpensive fulfillment, but if you’re trying to use FBA (because you’re selling on eBay or Shopify) it’s hopeless. It’s, like, three times as expensive. So we get people using Shopify or eBay. They love what we’re doing… We compete very effectively against them… They’re not the nimble creature they were years ago.”
 
Fatou Bintou Sagnang, Partner at Mubadala Capital Ventures, said: “Huboo’s product solves one of the most critical pain points for e-commerce companies – while order fulfillment is a core function for these companies, it is not part of their core competency. By combining logistics with a user-friendly software platform, Huboo delivers a superior fulfillment experience and allows businesses of all sizes to continue focusing on core activities such as product development while managing growing demand from their customers.” 
 
Matt Penneycard, Founding Partner at Ada Ventures, said: “Huboo is a shining light of UK tech, and we’re particularly delighted for a Bristol-based company to be succeeding this way! Martin and Paul’s incredible vision is becoming a global reality at supersonic speed.” 

Fred Destin, Founder at Stride.VC, said: “Huboo does the seemingly impossible – to deliver high-precision e-commerce fulfillment cost-effectively to businesses of all sizes and levels of complexity. Huboo innovates both in how it looks at logistics, as an interlocked set of lego blocks connected by software, and how it looks at people, as a team of empowered self-starters obsessed about customer success.”

TikTok this week presented its new plan to ramp up advertiser investment in its video platform with the expansion of e-commerce, a new promise of “brand safety,” and the launch of several new and interactive ad formats, ranging from clickable stickers to choose-your-own-adventure ads to “super likes” and more. The additions, the company says, will make TikTok’s advertising more interactive and creative, much like the TikTok experience itself.

The company demonstrated its new additions at an online conference aimed at the advertising and marketing community on Tuesday.

Here, TikTok also announced several new e-commerce partnerships beyond its pilot partner Shopify to make online shopping a more native experience, with the ability for users to go from product discovery to checkout without leaving the app. It noted it’s making live shopping available to brands and offered several ad products made just for e-commerce brands. And, in some markets, TikTok is offering to take on the responsibilities of shipping and fulfillment, as well.

Meanwhile, TikTok’s broader ads business is getting a jolt with the launch of several new products designed with the goal of making TikTok better differentiated from other social media rivals.

On this front, TikTok introduced a new product called “instant page,” which is a quick-loading landing page that the company claims will load 11 times faster than a typical mobile website. This allows a user who clicks through on an ad to be immediately taken to a page where they’ll be able to see more information from the brand, watch more videos, and swipe through other content — all without leaving the TikTok app. This could compete with Instagram’s Link Sticker which recently stepped in to replace the swipe-up gesture in its app.

Image Credits: TikTok (instant page)

Another new product, “pop out showcase,” aims to make engaging with ads a more interactive experience.

With “pop out showcase,” advertisers can access a library of stickers and images that can be superimposed on top of their TikTok videos to illustrate the products they’re demonstrating or other key story elements. For instance, a beauty brand may add a sticker of a makeup brush to its content that, when tapped, takes the viewer to a page where they can buy a makeup brush from the brand.

Image Credits: TikTok (pop out showcase)

Other new formats encourage TikTok users to tap on the ads themselves.

One of these is TikTok’s “super like.” This offers a way to make “liking” a video a more engaging experience. When users tap the like (heart) button on a TikTok video, the Super Like can display different types of icons that appear on viewers’ screens. Users are also invited to visit a landing page where they can learn more about the brand’s product or service being featured.

Image Credits: TikTok (super like)

There are also gesture ads that will reveal rewards or other information to users who either slide or tap on videos. Like the “pop out showcase: and “super like,” these ads play to the familiarity that TikTok users — particularly its young Gen Z and millennial demographic — have with how to navigate their smartphones. It’s second nature for younger people to know to tap, swipe, and drag, and these ads offer some form of immediate gratification for doing so, whether that’s an explosion of icons or even a real-life reward.

Image Credits: TikTok (gesture ads)

The final new product is TikTok’s “storytime tool,” which encourages users to become a part of the brand’s storytelling experience. Some streaming services, like Hulu, have experimented with ads that ask the users to play along — but not quite to the extent of controlling the story. Instead of just watching a TikTok ad, this choose-your-own-adventure style format lets users tap to direct the action in the video to shape the narrative and personalize the outcome.

Image Credits: TikTok (storytime tool)

“All these solutions are a part of our goal to enable advertisers to create the most engaging ads in ways that taps into their creativity and fun that exists on the platform,” said Jaclyn Fitzpatrick, TikTok Product Strategist, Global Business Marketing, when introducing the new lineup.

Of course, performance and measurement capabilities are just as important to marketers as the ad creatives themselves. To address these concerns, the company touted its TikTok Ad Manager, editing suite, trends and insights, and other new tools for buying, scaling, and analyzing their campaigns. It launched a new buying type called Reach & Frequency, which allows advertisers to target a higher volume of users through extended reach, or get more impressions with the same number of users by opting into a higher frequency for their ad placements.

TikTok also made a commitment to brand safety — an issue that’s plagued YouTube in the past — with the launch of a proprietary brand safety inventory filter.

The solution leverages machine learning technology to classify a video’s risk based on the video’s content, text, audio, and more, so advertisers can make decisions about which kind of inventory they want to run adjacent to, the company explained. TikTok says the new filter is aligned with the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM)’s industry framework and it partnered with Integrate Ad Science (IAS), Zefr, and OpenSlate to help it to ensure ads run next to brand-safe content.

The message to advertisers, clearly, is that TikTok should be considered not only because of its sizable audience — now 1 billion monthly actives, it says — but also because of its advertising toolset.

To date, marketers haven’t carved out as much of their spending for TikTok compared with other major platforms, like Facebook and Instagram. But TikTok parent company, ByteDance, has been making inroads in the global ad market, with annual revenue across its apps more than doubling in 2020 to reach $34.3 billion. In the U.S., TikTok was expected to bring in $500 million in 2020, up from $200-$300 million in the year prior, according to a report by The Information. (Some of that is from in-app purchases, of course.)

As TikTok has scaled its ad business, its ad prices have been steadily increasing, too. Bloomberg noted this summer it was jacking up home page takeover ads, its most valuable real estate, to more than $2 million on top days — like holidays. Reuters also noted that TikTok saw a 500% increase in the number of advertisers that were running campaigns in the U.S. from the start of 2020 to the end, though ad sales were still small compared with other major platforms.

Image Credits: eMarketer

That continues to be the case in 2021, as TikTok’s U.S. ad revenues are dwarfed by other social brands. In fact, TikTok was not even broken out in eMarketer’s recent tabulation of U.S. ad revenues, where it’s instead lumped into an “Other” category with other, smaller social networks which, combined, are expected to reach $1.3 billion in 2021.

TikTok is expanding its investment in e-commerce. Earlier this year, the video platform began piloting TikTok Shopping in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, in partnership with Shopify. The deal allowed Shopify merchants with a TikTok For Business account to add a Shopping tab to their TikTok profiles and sync their product catalogs to the app to create mini-storefronts. Now, TikTok is announcing a slate of new brand partners for TikTok Shopping, including Square, Ecwid, and PrestaShop, with Wix, SHOPLINE, OpenCart, and BASE coming soon. It also introduced a fuller slate of solutions for TikTok commerce, including ad products and later this year, a TikTok Shopping API.

The company detailed its further plans for TikTok Shopping at an online event called TikTok World on Tuesday.

Here, TikTok shared how popular commerce had become on its platform. For example, it noted that the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt hashtag — which users post when sharing products they had discovered through TikTok videos — has grown to include 4.6 billion views and is still climbing. The company also touted how well its video could push users from product awareness to action, claiming that, compared with competitors, TikTok users are 1.7 times more likely to have purchased products through the app.

Image Credits: TikTok Shopping

The company said it’s able to work with online merchants in a couple of different ways. One is a direct integration and full-service shopping solution where TikTok manages everything from shipping to fulfillment and point-of-purchase. This is a system TikTok has been testing in Indonesia, as TechCrunch previously reported. It’s also now available in the U.K.

The second way involves working with third-party commerce partners, like Shopify, who can provide sellers with essential backend tools and support.

Later this year, TikTok said it would also launch a TikTok Shopping API, which will allow businesses to integrate their product catalogs directly into TikTok, and eventually include those products in their organic content.

Image Credits: TikTok Shopping

In the meantime, TikTok will offer businesses a handful of other tools to get their products in front of consumers.

With Product Links, first introduced alongside the TikTok Shopping pilot, brands can highlight one or more products directly from an organic TikTok video, which then points uses to product detail pages on their own website. This is essentially TikTok’s version of something like Instagram’s product tags and stickers.

With the new LIVE shopping feature, brands on TikTok can connect with users in the community in real-time, and share dynamic links to products and services while the content is streaming live. In the past, Walmart hosted a couple of LIVE shopping events as a pilot partner on the feature.

The company also now offers a trio of in-feed ad products for online shopping: Collection Ads, Dynamic Showcase Ads (DSAs), and Lead Generation.

Image Credits: TikTok (Collection Ad)

Collection Ads are a new ad product that allows brands to include custom, swipeable product cards in their in-feed videos. Each card can feature a different product for sale and, when tapped, brings users to a fast-loading instant gallery page where TikTok users can browse items and make a purchase. This type of ad can be used to drive traffic to a merchant’s website, and can be particularly useful for things like limited-time deals, seasonal sales, and recent launches. TikTok cited one case study with a brand called Princess Polly which saw a 6x return on ad spend and an over 50% increase on overall product page visits with the ad.

Dynamic Showcase Ads are another new product, and allow brands to promote thousands (or even millions) of product SKUs via personalized video ads. DSA will generate video ads that target specific audiences based on their interests and commerce activities, such as adding items to a cart or viewing a product. TikTok has created a suite of DSA templates that follow the platform’s creative principles of offering creative clips with music and text overlays. TikTok claims early DSA tests indicate the templates are driving higher click-through rates and conversion rates for advertisers but didn’t share metrics. On this effort, it’s partnered with video marketing company SHAKR, plus Productsup and feedonomics who can help integrate product catalogs.

Image Credits: TikTok (DSA)

Lead Generation, meanwhile, continues to be available within in-feed video ads offering brands an easy way to collect information from TikTok users through online forms. These ads are best for businesses that have longer sales cycles, like audio and education. It has also partnered with Zapier and LeadsBridge to automatically connect a brand’s CRM to TikTok for a lead generation campaign. In a test with Southeast Asian marketplace Lazada, nearly half of the users who signed up on a form during the first week of a lead gen campaign ended up selling on the marketplace, TikTok says.

Image Credits: Lazada on TikTok

Combined, this suite of solutions is what makes up TikTok Shopping.

“The future of commerce on TikTok is a shopping experience that allows brands of all sizes to tap into the enthusiasm of our user base,” said TikTok Shopping Head of Product, Javier Irigoyen. “The magic of TikTok happens in the For You page, where e-commerce content is recommended to our users in the same way as short videos and live streams. TikTok is a place where users and brands can connect directly, and where an end-to-end shopping experience can happen organically. That’s the basis on which we’re building a long-term commerce division,” he said.

Monetization for the creator economy continues to be a huge issue and opportunity, but creators mostly have to lock themselves into platforms like Patreon to realize their value. A better method would be to have a membership system for creators which sat across several platforms.

Now, GMG Ventures (parent company of The Guardian newspaper) has unvested in Unlock, the developer of an open-source, Ethereum-based protocol designed to monetize and manage community memberships.

The $4 million funding round was led by VC firms including Betaworks, Cygni Labs, GMG Ventures, and Metacartel Ventures China, along with participation from early investors.

Unlock says its membership/monetization solution is used by artists, musicians, game developers (including Decentraland), writers, Discord communities, and others. It also plans partnerships with major media brands which are using its protocol.

Unlock CEO Julien Genestoux said: “With the funding we have raised to date, Unlock will continue growing to become the most complete, open-source platform to achieve this goal.”

Genestoux previously built Superfeedr, an RSS feed API purchased by Medium.

Founded in 2018, Unlock is an NFT-based protocol that records all transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Use cases include a WordPress plug-in that allows developers to add a membership/subscription option, and a community-created plug-in for Shopify enables retailers to add an Unlock-based purchase option on their website.

“Unlock’s open-source protocol for creator community memberships is poised to redefine the way creators interact with and grow their audiences in the years to come,” said Thomas Lueke at Cherry Ventures. “We look forward to celebrating Unlock’s growth as it continues to navigate this space and are excited to have invested in the company.”