The only headless e-commerce platform – Fabric

Fabric, a startup powering e-commerce for companies like GNC and ABC Carpet & Home, has raised $43 million in series A funding.

The announcement comes but four months after Fabric announced its $9.5 million seed round. CEO Faisal Masud said Fabric hadn’t intended to boost more funding so quickly, but given its growth and investor interest, the startup’s leadership team had to ask, “Do we delay the expansion or can we just go now?”

Since you’re reading this funding story the answer is perhaps self-evident. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with Norwest’s Scott Beechuk joining Fabric’s board of directors and Redpoint Ventures and Sierra Ventures also participated in it.

Fabric provides simplicity of drag-and-drop configuration and it is the only headless commerce platform with the facility to make rich modern customer experiences, and also Beechuk told that it doesn’t require any outsized dev team. Most importantly, however, is that the incontrovertible fact that Faisal (CEO) and [co-founder Ryan Bartley] are rockstar veterans of the e-commerce world from Amazon, eBay, Staples and Groupon. They empathize with their customers’ challenges and have the expertise to disrupt the mature e-commerce market with a significantly better product.

E-commerce has grown rapidly during the pandemic, and there are variety of platforms offering a “headless” approach, which (as Masud explained during a blog post) separates the frontend and the backend of the shopping experience.

But Masud said there’s still “a large gap within the market today” when it involves supporting large, growing brands, whether they’re direct-to-consumer or business-to-business.

We wish to say that Shopify Plus is our on-ramp and Salesforce Commerce Cloud is our off-ramp, he said. We can also say that Fabric serves businesses that have “outgrown Shopify Plus but don’t want to spend a fortune on Salesforce Commerce Cloud.”

To serve those customers, Fabric has built 32 separate applications which may be integrated with existing commerce tools, and which collectively cover
everything from customer experience to product information and order management.

Masud tells that the majority of the other products billing themselves as headless e-commerce platforms are rough and ready themselves to become headless.

“They were inbuilt 2007, they’re not flexible or modular,” he said, adding that while older platforms might require 18 months to on-board an outsized customer, Fabric only requires weeks.

The startup isn’t demoralizing its customers from having a presence on Amazon and other marketplaces. But Masud said they have to create their own changed shopping experiences and their own direct relationship with consumers at an equivalent time.

With the new funding, Fabric are going to be ready to expand its sales and marketing team while also continuing to enhance the merchandise. Masud said he’s less curious about reaching larger or smaller customers, and more curious about expansion by “building out a much bigger suite of co-pilot apps,” for instance by doing more to support order logistics and fulfillment.