Conduit Commerce
AI Copilot for sales teams integrating into workflows to enable faster operations.
Website: https://www.conduitcommerce.com/
Cover Block
PUBLIC
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | Conduit Commerce |
| Tagline | AI Copilot for sales teams integrating into workflows to enable faster operations |
| Headquarters | New York, United States |
| Founded | 2023 |
| Stage | Seed |
| Business Model | SaaS |
| Industry / Vertical | E-commerce / Retail |
| Technology Type | AI / Machine Learning |
| Geography | North America |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Co-Founders (2) |
| Funding Label | Seed VC |
Links
PUBLIC
- Website: https://www.conduitcommerce.com/
- LinkedIn (CEO): https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohanyshah
- Forbes profile (CEO): https://www.forbes.com/profile/rohan-shah-2/
Executive Summary
PUBLIC
Conduit Commerce is a New York based seed-stage software company building an AI copilot that sits inside the daily workflow of wholesale and direct-to-consumer sales teams, with an early focus on furniture, home decor, record labels, and entertainment merchandise [Conduit Commerce]. The company was founded in 2023 by Rohan Shah and Rahul Sinha, childhood friends who began the project together and won the $35,000 Sunstone New Venture Prize at the USC Marshall New Venture Seed Competition for the concept [USC Marshall][Forbes]. The core product combines a wholesale portal that replaces email-thread ordering with an integration layer that syncs product, inventory, and orders across ERPs, storefronts, and consumer surfaces such as Shopify, Instagram Shop, TikTok Shop, and ChatGPT [Conduit Commerce][RockWater]. Differentiation, on the public evidence, rests on the vertical packaging (pre-built site spin-up, dealer reminder automation, structured product feeds for AI search) rather than on a proprietary model layer. The investor base disclosed across third-party databases includes Backwards Capital, First Round Capital, Susa Ventures, Good Friends, and Night Ventures, although the dollar size of the institutional round has not been publicly disclosed [CB Insights]. CEO Rohan Shah previously co-founded Extend in 2019, a merchant warranty platform whose customers include Logitech, Harman, and Advance Auto Parts, and was named to the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Retail and Ecommerce [Harker News][Forbes]. Over the next 12 to 18 months the questions that will matter most are whether Conduit can convert vertical pilots in furniture and entertainment into multi-account expansions, and whether the recently reported acquisition of TikTok Shop enabler Wally translates into a defensible distribution position on social commerce surfaces [RockWater].
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed across Conduit Commerce, Forbes, USC Marshall, RockWater, and CB Insights.
Taxonomy Snapshot
| Axis | Value |
|---|---|
| Stage | Seed |
| Business Model | SaaS |
| Industry / Vertical | E-commerce / Retail (wholesale, furniture, entertainment, record labels) |
| Technology Type | AI / Machine Learning |
| Geography | North America |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Co-Founders (2) |
| Funding | Seed VC |
Company Overview
PUBLIC
Conduit Commerce was founded in 2023 by Rohan Shah and Rahul Sinha as a software platform aimed at moving wholesale distributors from offline order capture into integrated online sales flows [f4.fund][Forbes]. The company is headquartered in New York and is incorporated as Conduit Commerce, Inc. according to the footer of its public site [Conduit Commerce]. The original pitch, as described in Forbes, was a single platform connecting retailers and suppliers across inventory, drop-shipping, and supply chain queries, an idea that has since broadened into vertical workflows for furniture and home decor, record labels, and entertainment merchandise [Forbes][Conduit Commerce].
The earliest documented milestone is the team's first-place finish in the USC Marshall New Venture Seed Competition, where the founders took the $35,000 Sunstone New Venture Prize for Conduit Commerce [USC Marshall]. The company subsequently raised an undisclosed institutional seed round with participation from Backwards Capital, First Round Capital, Susa Ventures, Good Friends, and Night Ventures, per the company profile maintained on CB Insights [CB Insights]. In 2025, Rohan Shah was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Retail and Ecommerce in his capacity as cofounder of Conduit Commerce [Forbes]. Industry tracker RockWater also reported that Conduit acquired Wally, a TikTok Shop enabler, a transaction that aligns with the company's stated push into structured product feeds for social and AI surfaces [RockWater].
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Conduit Commerce, Forbes, USC Marshall, CB Insights, and RockWater.
Product and Technology
MIXED
Conduit positions itself publicly as "One AI Copilot. Built for Every Sales Role," a product framing that emphasizes embedding inside the existing tools of sales and account-management staff rather than replacing them [PUBLIC] [Conduit Commerce]. The shipped surface area, based on the company's own documentation, falls into three buckets. The first is a wholesale portal designed to replace email threads between brands and their dealers, providing an order, invoice, and restock interface that retailers can self-serve [PUBLIC] [Conduit Commerce]. The second is an integration layer that connects to a brand's ERP, storefront, and what the site calls "AI channels," sending automated reminders to dealers about new drops, unpaid invoices, and restocks without manual intervention [PUBLIC] [Conduit Commerce]. The third is a structured product publishing layer aimed at the entertainment vertical, which formats and syndicates artist merchandise so that products surface inside Google, Instagram, TikTok, and ChatGPT in shoppable form [PUBLIC] [Conduit Commerce].
On the platform integration side, RockWater reports that Conduit's product syncs real-time product, inventory, and orders across platforms including Shopify, Instagram Shop, and TikTok, which is consistent with the acquisition of Wally as a TikTok Shop enabler [PUBLIC] [RockWater]. The company also offers a managed onboarding motion, telling prospects on the StreetPulse and furniture pages that it will "spin up your site, load your products," and handle the technical and logistical setup itself, suggesting a high-touch implementation layer wrapped around the SaaS [PUBLIC] [Conduit Commerce]. Underlying model architecture, proprietary data assets, and any fine-tuned components are not described publicly; the differentiation that the company foregrounds is workflow placement and vertical packaging rather than a model-layer claim [PUBLIC]. Public job postings that would let an analyst infer the production tech stack were not surfaced at the time of writing [PRIVATE].
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Conduit Commerce primary site and RockWater.
Market Research and Opportunity
PUBLIC
The market that matters for Conduit is the digitization of B2B wholesale ordering and the parallel emergence of AI-mediated product discovery on consumer surfaces, two trends that are converging on the same brand operations team. No third-party TAM specific to Conduit's vertical wedge has been published in sources captured for this report, and the company itself has not released a sizing claim. In the absence of a cited number, the relevant directional signal is qualitative: f4.fund describes the addressable problem as helping wholesale distributors transition from offline to online sales through dropshipping and inventory management, with retailers expanding assortment without taking on stocking risk [f4.fund].
Demand drivers visible in the cited research cluster around three forces. First, the migration of dealer ordering from email and phone to self-serve portals, a shift Conduit's wholesale portal product is explicitly designed to capture [Conduit Commerce]. Second, the rise of social commerce surfaces, particularly TikTok Shop and Instagram Shop, which has created a need for brands to publish structured product data into channels they do not directly control; this is the gap RockWater cites in describing Conduit's acquisition of Wally and the company's real-time sync across Shopify, Instagram Shop, and TikTok [RockWater]. Third, the early but real expectation that AI assistants such as ChatGPT will become a product discovery surface, which Conduit references directly in its entertainment-vertical pitch by promising that an artist's products will "show up in Google, Instagram, TikTok, ChatGPT, and beyond, structured, optimized, and ready to be bought" [Conduit Commerce].
Adjacent and substitute markets include legacy B2B e-commerce platforms used by manufacturers and distributors, headless commerce stacks built around Shopify and similar storefronts, and the growing set of AI sales-assistant tools targeting outbound and CRM workflows. Conduit's vertical packaging into furniture, home decor, record labels, and entertainment merchandise is a deliberate narrowing rather than a horizontal SaaS bet [Conduit Commerce]. Regulatory and macro forces on this category are relatively light at present, although platform policy changes at TikTok, Instagram, and any future agentic-commerce protocol from OpenAI or Google would directly reshape the publishing layer Conduit is building toward.
| Sizing claim | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Qualitative addressable problem | Wholesale distributors moving from offline to online sales via dropshipping and inventory management | [f4.fund] |
| Channel surfaces in scope | Shopify, Instagram Shop, TikTok Shop, Google, ChatGPT | [Conduit Commerce][RockWater] |
The cited evidence describes a real and broadening surface area (B2B portal plus multi-channel publishing plus AI discovery) but does not yet include a third-party dollar TAM specific to this wedge, so investors should treat sizing as a qualitative thesis until a named report or company disclosure arrives.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Multiple primary and secondary sources describe the surface area, but no third-party numeric TAM is cited.
Competitive Landscape
MIXED
The competitive analysis below therefore proceeds as prose, by category rather than by named-rival comparison [PUBLIC].
In the B2B wholesale platform pool, the incumbent reference points are general-purpose B2B commerce suites and dealer-portal tools that brands have historically bolted onto Shopify or NetSuite. Conduit's pitch against that incumbent set, on the public evidence, is that it ships a vertical-specific portal and reminder automation out of the box rather than asking the brand to build it: the furniture supplier page explicitly frames the product as reminding dealers about "new drops, unpaid invoices, and restocks without lifting a finger" and integrating with the ERP and storefront without custom development [PUBLIC] [Conduit Commerce]. Where Conduit is most exposed in this pool is the renewal motion: a managed onboarding model that spins the site up for the customer is attractive at land but creates a services-heavy cost structure that has historically been hard to scale into pure SaaS gross margins.
In the social-commerce enablement pool, the relevant alternatives are channel-specific tools that publish into TikTok Shop, Instagram Shop, and Google Shopping, plus the native tools each platform offers. Conduit's reported acquisition of Wally, described by RockWater as a TikTok Shop enabler, suggests the company is buying rather than building distribution into this layer, which is a defensible move if it secures a head start on the agentic-commerce surfaces (ChatGPT and similar) that Conduit's entertainment page already names [PUBLIC] [RockWater][Conduit Commerce]. The exposure here is platform risk: TikTok Shop, Instagram Shop, and any future ChatGPT shopping API can each change terms or bring functionality in-house.
In the AI sales copilot pool, the broader market is crowded with horizontal tools targeting outbound, CRM hygiene, and rep productivity. Conduit's defensible edge, on the public evidence, is not the model layer but the workflow placement inside specific verticals (furniture dealers, record labels, entertainment merchandise) where the data shape and the buying motion are idiosyncratic enough that a horizontal copilot would need significant configuration to compete [PUBLIC] [Conduit Commerce]. The durability of that edge depends on whether Conduit can accumulate proprietary catalog and dealer-behavior data inside each vertical fast enough to make a horizontal entrant economically uninteresting.
The most plausible 18-month scenario: Conduit becomes a winner if a named furniture or entertainment brand publicly attributes a meaningful revenue lift to the platform and that case study pulls in same-vertical peers, because vertical commerce categories tend to consolidate around the first tool with a credible reference customer. Conduit becomes a loser if Shopify, TikTok, or a horizontal AI copilot ships native dealer-portal and multi-channel publishing features bundled into an existing seat that brands already pay for, in which case the stand-alone procurement decision Conduit asks for becomes harder to justify.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Category framing supported by Conduit Commerce and RockWater; no named direct competitor is confirmed in the captured sources.
Opportunity
PUBLIC
If Conduit executes, the prize is becoming the default operating layer for brands that need to sell into both traditional dealer networks and the new generation of AI- and social-mediated consumer surfaces.
The headline opportunity
The single largest outcome Conduit could plausibly become is the embedded commerce layer for vertical brands whose products live across a dealer channel, a direct storefront, and emerging AI shopping surfaces simultaneously. The cited evidence makes this reachable rather than aspirational because the company has already shipped product across all three of those surfaces (a wholesale portal, ERP and Shopify integrations, and structured publishing into Instagram, TikTok, Google, and ChatGPT) and has reinforced the social-commerce piece by acquiring Wally [Conduit Commerce][RockWater]. The investor syndicate (Backwards Capital, First Round Capital, Susa Ventures, Good Friends, and Night Ventures) is consistent with a category-bet thesis rather than a feature company [CB Insights].
Growth scenarios
| Scenario | What happens | Catalyst | Why it's plausible |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vertical category leader in furniture and home decor | Conduit becomes the default dealer-portal and multi-channel publishing layer for mid-market furniture brands | A named furniture supplier publicly cites measurable dealer-order lift | Conduit already ships supplier and retailer products specifically for the furniture vertical [Conduit Commerce] |
| Default merchandise stack for entertainment and music | Record labels and artist teams adopt Conduit to publish merchandise into Instagram, TikTok, and ChatGPT shoppable surfaces | Continued growth of social and AI-mediated product discovery | Conduit has a dedicated entertainment and record-labels product line and explicitly targets ChatGPT as a discovery channel [Conduit Commerce] |
| Agentic-commerce publishing standard | Conduit becomes one of a small number of brand-side tools that structure product data for AI assistants | Adoption of an agentic shopping protocol by a major AI platform | Conduit's positioning already names ChatGPT alongside Google, Instagram, and TikTok as in-scope surfaces [Conduit Commerce], and the Wally acquisition extends its publishing footprint [RockWater] |
What compounding looks like
The flywheel that turns one win into the next is catalog and dealer-behavior data. Each brand that onboards loads SKUs, pricing, inventory, and dealer relationships into Conduit's graph; each dealer that uses the portal generates ordering and reorder signal; each social or AI channel that pulls structured feeds creates a closed loop of which products and presentations convert. The early evidence that this loop is starting comes from the acquisition of Wally, which folds an existing TikTok Shop publishing footprint into Conduit's catalog layer rather than requiring it to be rebuilt customer by customer [RockWater]. The managed onboarding motion (Conduit spinning the site up and loading products on the brand's behalf) also concentrates catalog data inside Conduit earlier in the relationship than a self-serve SaaS would [Conduit Commerce].
The size of the win
A credible directional comparable is Faire, the wholesale marketplace, whose most recent publicly reported private valuation has been in the multi-billion-dollar range in trade press, and Shopify, the public storefront platform whose market capitalization is in the hundreds of billions. Conduit is not building either of those companies; it is building a thinner brand-side operating layer that sits between them and the consumer surfaces. If the vertical-leader scenario plays out across two or three categories, the outcome is plausibly a category-defining vertical SaaS in the same conceptual cohort as the brand-operations tools that have reached unicorn-plus valuations in the last cycle (scenario, not a forecast). The Forbes recognition of Rohan Shah on the 2025 30 Under 30 list for Retail and Ecommerce, and his prior co-founding of Extend with customers including Logitech, Harman, and Advance Auto Parts, are signals that the founding profile has previously cleared the bar for building a serious commerce-infrastructure company [Forbes][Harker News].
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Scenarios anchored in confirmed product surface area and investor syndicate; outcome sizing is explicitly labelled as scenario rather than forecast.
Sources
PUBLIC
[Conduit Commerce] Conduit Commerce homepage | https://www.conduitcommerce.com/
[Conduit Commerce] Stop email threads. Give retailers a portal that works. | https://www.conduitcommerce.com/products/wholesale-portal
[Conduit Commerce] Record Labels | https://www.conduitcommerce.com/record-labels
[Conduit Commerce] StreetPulse | https://www.conduitcommerce.com/streetpulse
[Conduit Commerce] Furniture and Home Decor, Suppliers | https://www.conduitcommerce.com/supply/furniture
[Conduit Commerce] Furniture and Home Decor, Retailers | https://www.conduitcommerce.com/retail/furniture
[Conduit Commerce] Entertainment | https://www.conduitcommerce.com/entertainment
[f4.fund] Conduit Commerce, E-commerce and Marketplaces | https://f4.fund/startups/conduitcommerce
[parsers.vc] Conduit Commerce, Funding, Valuation, Investors, News | https://parsers.vc/startup/conduitcommerce.com/
[prospeo.io] Conduit Commerce Overview, Address and Contact | https://prospeo.io/c/conduit-commerce
[RocketReach] Rohan Shah, Conduit Commerce Co-Founder and CEO Contact Information | https://rocketreach.co/rohan-shah-email_1855460
[LinkedIn] Rohan Shah, Supercharging Wholesale with AI | https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohanyshah
[Forbes] Rohan Shah profile | https://www.forbes.com/profile/rohan-shah-2/
[RockWater] Conduit Commerce Buys Wally, TikTok Shop Enabler Attracts Capital | https://wearerockwater.com/conduit-commerce-buys-wally/
[CB Insights] Conduit Commerce, Products, Competitors, Financials, Employees, Headquarters Locations | https://www.cbinsights.com/company/conduit-commerce
[USC Marshall] USC Marshall New Venture Seed Competition, Sunstone New Venture Prize | https://www.marshall.usc.edu/
Articles about Conduit Commerce
- Conduit Commerce Is Building a Sales Copilot for the Furniture Showroom and the Record Label — The New York seed-stage startup is wiring wholesale catalogs into Shopify, TikTok Shop, and ChatGPT for verticals that still run on email threads.