Fund III is in its early deployment phase. We're not writing about our investment pipeline, but we are thinking publicly about the sub-sectors that interest us most entering 2023. Social commerce sits at the top of that list — not because it's newly interesting, but because we think the infrastructure layer underneath it is still significantly underdeveloped relative to the commerce volume it's moving.
The scale of social commerce is now real and measurable. TikTok Shop's launch in the US market has validated that live commerce can work at scale outside of Asia. Instagram Shopping, Pinterest's product discovery features, and YouTube Shopping integrations have collectively moved social commerce from experimental feature to meaningful commerce channel for a significant segment of brands and creators. The commerce volume is real. The infrastructure underneath it is patchwork.
Three infrastructure gaps stand out from our sourcing conversations over the past six months:
Creator-brand attribution and reconciliation. The economics of creator-driven social commerce are complex: a creator promotes a product, a percentage of their audience converts, and that conversion may happen across multiple touchpoints before the final purchase. The attribution infrastructure — connecting creator promotion to eventual purchase — is expensive, unreliable, and non-standard. Brands cannot reliably pay creators on performance because they cannot reliably measure creator-attributed performance. That's a solvable infrastructure problem.
Cross-platform inventory and fulfillment coordination. A creator with audiences on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube is operating in three distinct commerce ecosystems that have no shared inventory visibility, no unified order management, and no standard fulfillment infrastructure that spans all three. Running a social commerce business at scale currently requires three separate operational setups. Creators and brands accept this as the cost of distribution diversity. It's actually an infrastructure gap that has a business inside it.
Creator-to-brand relationship management. The operational overhead of managing creator-brand partnerships — discovery, contracting, payment, reporting, renewal — is significant and unscaled. The companies building CRM-like infrastructure for creator-brand relationships are doing the right thing, but the category is still early and the incumbent solutions are inadequate. We're watching this carefully.
We're actively sourcing in all three of these gaps. If you're building infrastructure for any of these categories, we want to talk.