Fabric

Fabric is a Seattle-based e-commerce technology company that provides back-end infrastructure for online retail. Its platform, described as "headless" or modular commerce, separates back-end systems from front-end customer experiences and covers pricing and promotions, inventory management, product information, order management, digital storefronts, and payments and checkout. Customers can adopt the entire stack or select individual commerce APIs, with the platform acting as an orchestration layer across modules; the company has characterized its positioning as an "AWS for commerce."

The company targets mid-market retail and business-to-business brands that want capabilities comparable to Amazon's but lack the in-house technical resources to build them, and supports omnichannel models spanning online and in-store sales. Named customers have included GNC, Restoration Hardware, Chico's, McDonald's, TriMark, L'azurde and The Honest Company.

Leadership has drawn heavily on former Amazon executives. CEO Faisal Masud spent more than six years at Amazon, where he worked on inventory tools and the AmazonBasics line, and later held roles at eBay, Groupon, Staples (as chief digital officer and CTO) and Wing. Other executives named in 2022 included COO Stacy Saal, CTO Umer Sadiq, CMO Karen Brewer, CFO Nevin Shetty, chief people officer Val Rupp and chief legal officer Krupah Shah.

Founding story

Fabric was founded in 2017 by Ryan Bartley and Shiv Agarwal, who had previously been technology leaders at Staples while Faisal Masud was the retailer's chief digital officer and later chief technology officer; Bartley had also helped lead Staples' Seattle engineering office and had worked with Masud at eBay.

Business model

Fabric licenses commerce software to retailers and B2B brands, selling either a full commerce stack or individual modules from its suite of APIs so customers can adopt only the components they need, such as product information management or order management.

Revenue comes from retailers and B2B brands using its commerce software, APIs and related technology; the company reported revenue growth of more than 800% year-over-year as of July 2021.

Traction

Revenue grew more than 800% year-over-year as of July 2021; headcount rose 400% between February and July 2021 to 161 employees and reached about 300 by February 2022. Disclosed total funding was $153 million in July 2021 and $293.5 million in February 2022, with valuations of $193 million (February 2021), $850 million (July 2021) and about $1.5 billion (February 2022).

Latest developments

In February 2022 Fabric announced a $140 million Series C led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 at a valuation of about $1.5 billion, with Forerunner Ventures, Glynn Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Norwest Ventures and Stripes participating. Proceeds were earmarked for EMEA expansion and for adding intelligence and autonomy to its commerce tools. SoftBank's Robert Kaplan joined the board.