On a furniture supplier's back office, the daily reality is a stack of unread retailer emails. Conduit Commerce, a New York seed-stage company founded in 2023, is betting that this kind of wholesale workflow is the right wedge for an AI copilot built specifically for sales teams [Conduit Commerce].
The pitch from co-founders Rohan Shah and Rahul Sinha is to sell a wholesale portal that replaces email threads between suppliers and retailers, plus a copilot that integrates with a supplier's ERP, storefront, and AI channels to push reminders on new drops, unpaid invoices, and restocks [Conduit Commerce]. On the consumer-facing side, Conduit syncs product, inventory, and order data in real time across Shopify, Instagram Shop, and TikTok Shop, according to industry outlet RockWater, which also reported Conduit's acquisition of TikTok Shop enabler Wally [RockWater]. For entertainment clients, including record labels, the company structures artist merchandise so it surfaces in Google, Instagram, TikTok, and ChatGPT search [Conduit Commerce].
The bet
The ICP is mid-market wholesale suppliers and the retailers they sell into, concentrated in furniture, home decor, entertainment merchandise, and record labels. Conduit's wedge is to spin up the storefront, load the SKUs, and handle the technical and logistical plumbing so the supplier does not need a custom development project to go live [Conduit Commerce].
Why it could be big
The tailwind Conduit is riding is the fragmentation of where commerce happens. A furniture brand in 2025 needs to be merchandised on its own site, on Instagram Shop, on TikTok Shop, in Google's shopping surfaces, and in conversational interfaces like ChatGPT. A vertical AI layer that owns the catalog and pushes structured data outward is a credible answer to that problem [Conduit Commerce].
The cap table reflects investors who tend to back this kind of operator-led, vertical SaaS bet. Conduit's seed backers include First Round Capital, Susa Ventures, Backwards Capital, Good Friends, and Night Ventures [CB Insights]. The earliest validation came from the USC Marshall New Venture Seed Competition [USC Marshall].
| Milestone | Detail | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Sunstone New Venture Prize | $35,000, first place | USC Marshall |
| Seed round | Amount undisclosed, multi-investor syndicate | CB Insights |
| Wally acquisition | TikTok Shop enabler folded in | RockWater |
| Forbes 30 Under 30 | Retail and Ecommerce, 2025 | Forbes |
The team and traction
Rohan Shah is co-founder and CEO; he previously co-founded Extend in 2019, a merchant-facing warranty platform that signed customers including Logitech, Harman, and Advance Auto Parts [Harker News]. Forbes named Shah to its 30 Under 30 Retail and Ecommerce list for 2025 [Forbes]. Co-founder Rahul Sinha shared the USC Marshall prize [USC Marshall]. The company has also disclosed a head of product, Anupya Nalamalapu [prospeo.io]. The Wally acquisition suggests Conduit is willing to buy capability rather than build every channel integration from scratch [RockWater].
The honest counterfactual
What a skeptical buyer asks first: who owns the budget, and what does the renewal look like? In wholesale furniture and record-label merchandise, the budget owner is usually a VP of sales or a head of operations. The competitive set Conduit will be measured against is real. Horizontal B2B commerce platforms like Faire serve a different shape of buyer but compete for the same retailer attention. NuORDER (now part of Lightspeed) and Brandboom have served wholesale brands for years. Conduit's answer is that none of those competitors has built a sales copilot tuned to the specific verticals it is going after, with the onboarding services to get a non-technical supplier live in days [Conduit Commerce] [RockWater].
What to watch
The next twelve months should produce three readable signals: a priced Series A or seed extension, a published customer logo or two outside furniture and entertainment, and evidence that the Wally acquisition has converted into TikTok Shop GMV. Procurement leads at mid-market suppliers should ask for a reference customer in their exact category, a written SLA on the channel-sync uptime, and the renewal rate on the wholesale portal product.