New e-commerce software company led by ex-Thrasio CTO launches with equity-as-a-service acquisition after raising $12m

Swiftline, a software company providing e-commerce businesses with a suite of products and services, announced its launch today, along with its first acquisition.

With $12 million in Series A funding, Swiftline purchased Yardline, a capital-as-a-service provider for sellers, from leading aggregator Amazon Thrasio for an undisclosed amount, the company reported Tuesday.

Ari Horowitz, former senior vice president of strategic partnerships and corporate development at Thrasio, and Tomo Matsuo, former vice president of fintech at Thrasio, founded Yardline in 2020, and it was acquired by Thrasio in 2021. Thrasio will be a non-controlling minority shareholder in Swiftline, the company reported, and Horowitz told Insider they expect to have the same type of relationship with a number of Amazon and e-commerce aggregators that take brands and use economies of scale to turn them into multi-million dollar businesses. .

Anthony Johnson, co-founder and CTO of Swiftline and former CTO of Thrasio, said Insider aggregators use many different tools to effectively manage their Amazon business. But these tools, Johnson added, “don’t talk to each other, don’t interact, and don’t give a single set of recommendations. Very simple questions like, ‘What should I do today?’ become incredibly difficult,” he added.

Swiftline hopes to provide easy-to-use dashboards and tools for e-commerce sellers to gain insight into how their businesses are performing, along with recommendations on what steps they can take to make them more profitable and when. it might be time to consider leaving for an aggregator.

Many brands and aggregators, Johnson said, “try to develop the technology in-house, but it’s expensive, it’s difficult, and it requires a specific skill set, which most of them don’t have.” .

The insights and recommendations provided by the Swiftline tools will be informed by data from a wide range of e-commerce platforms, not just Amazon, and an enterprise version will be designed for use by the aggregators themselves.