California, US – October 27th 2022; Global retail e-commerce sales are set to reach $8.1T in 2026 and brands will be vying for ecommerce store conversions and growth to capture this revenue opportunity. Helping them to achieve this, retail tech platform mason is today announcing a $7.5M seed round to offer an Amazon grade store infrastructure storefront to help them sell better and faster without exorbitant Amazon fees. The funding round was led by Accel and Ideaspring Capital with participation from  Lightspeed India Partners as well as Mana VC, Gaingels, Core91 and VH Capital.

mason brings a high-performance Amazon-grade sales engine to a brand’s own store. It reduces the onus on online brands to rely on Amazon and relieve them of the ‘Amazon tax’. 

Having spent decades building solutions in Myntra, Flipkart, Walmart, Paytm (an Alibaba company) which help merchants break free from the Amazon model, mason founders Barada Sahu and Kausambi Manjita are bringing their multi-decade experience to power growth for brands & founders. 

They met at Myntra – Walmart’s fashion arm in Asia – where they had been building a custom engine to run stores, improve revenue and drive conversions for over 1000+ brands on the Myntra marketplace. The penny dropped when they realised that growth was not a one-size fits all opportunity but that it had to have bespoke store engines that would run online stores to sell 

Kausambi Manjita, Co-Founder heading Product & Customer Experience at mason commented: “This changes the game fundamentally on how brands think about their D2C store today. Most brands are left with no option but to sell at marketplaces like Amazon and pay 35c for every dollar simply because running a profitable standalone D2C store is just too hard. With access to their own growth engine like mason, brands can actually transform their D2C storefront into their most profitable channel, getting 50% uplift in their margins from day one. By democratising access to a complex tech stack, from data-driven merchandising, to sales automation, to personalization – the team is helping more entrepreneurs stay independent, become profitable, and not sell out to a Thrasio.”

Barada Sahu, Co-Founder and head of Revenue & Growth added: “Traditionally, only big retail has had the technology muscle to implement complex infrastructure while the rest of the market has been left stitching together fragmented solutions that simply do not work well with each other. mason simplifies this with an all-in-one no code solution that powers marketers, product managers and founders to upgrade their stores from storytelling to selling from day one. Paying an upfront cost for a large headless implementation or a sophisticated merchandising engine is beyond what most brands can work on. For small and medium businesses an all-in-one solution with a commission-based model is easier to understand.”

Today, mason has over 1,000 customers and powers more than 8,000 brands worldwide with a pay as you grow pricing model. Their customers currently include companies in fashion & apparels, beauty & grooming, health & fitness and food & beverage categories with others such as pets, babycare and home products coming onboard too. In just over 2 years since launch, mason has helped global brands make their stores as efficient in sales as Amazon. A typical store improves average order value by 23% in 30 days, improves session time by 17% and improves sell through by 35% in just 60 days

Subrata Mitra, Partner at Accel commented: “In order to build a truly scalable outcome, the team is on the journey to create a self-serve platform wherein eCommerce brand owners could use it to create, communicate and grow. An upside to this: it allows them to go global.”

Kausambi Manjita remarked: “Commerce is about selling – not storing. The previous generation of commerce has helped brands set up their stores online and have great systems for storing business information. What brands now need is a technology layer that helps convert this information in action. We are building the world’s first commerce-engine. We will be doubling our investment into category specific AI-based playbooks to help brands grow simply.”