The Digital Commerce Moat That’s Become a Magnet for Investors

Anyone who’s read our brand new Digital Commerce market report will know that dealmaking in the sector is currently on bullish form, with transaction volume leaping by almost 20% last year. The concurrent rise in revenue and EBITDA valuations further underscores the strong confidence in the market right now.

AI is of course one of the biggest momentum makers, with buyers and investors showing sustained interest in e-commerce content creation and workflow automation platforms. However, the report also discusses the double-edged nature of the AI transition in Digital Commerce. On the one hand, it’s driving acquisitions of businesses whose leveraging of AI demonstrate tangible KPI advantages. On the other, it calls into question the long-term resilience of agencies, services providers and SaaS platforms which may be rapidly superseded as autonomous agents continue to take over tasks.  

As Hampleton’s Sector Principal Ralph Hübner says in the report, “Digital Commerce agencies and software platforms must now justify their relevance in an era where premium services can be executed by AI. And while substantial capital has been flowing to early-stage startups with demonstrable AI prowess, we anticipate the growing prioritisation of more durable moats, such as vertical-specific capabilities and ownership of data assets.”

The ability to collect, manage and marshal proprietary data has emerged as a critical differentiator for companies in this ecosystem, from online retailers seeking to offer hyper-personalised recommendations, to B2B services providers developing AI tools for predicting demand and successfully engaging with customers. 

This is a point emphasised in our report by guest contributor Paul Krauss, of tech consultancy Team One Developers, who points out: “CMOs are becoming process managers and must now oversee data and technology stacks in order to deliver brand stories to market. Agencies that fail to cater to these imperatives by meaningfully operationalising AI by around 2028 are expected to face heightened client attrition and competitive pressure as automation continues to compress pricing and delivery models.”

The new paradigm is fertile ground for startups specialising in dealing with e-commerce data. Here are some which have caught investors’ attention. 

Last month, Danish AI startup Cernel raised EUR 4m to progress its e-commerce data management platform, which provides the “foundational infrastructure for agentic commerce”. The company’s young founders dropped out of Aarhus University to devote themselves to the startup, motivated by their awareness of how the proliferation of AI agents means that “unstructured product data has become the biggest liability” for e-commerce companies.

The Cernel platform is designed to open up the bottleneck by automatically processing supplier data, converting fragmented information into consistent, validated and correctly formatted assets which can read by the AI agents which are increasingly executing critical tasks for e-commerce companies

Another data infrastructure startup receiving major backing is Ryft, which emerged from stealth last July with USD 8m in seed funding. Headquartered in Israel (and not to be confused with the UK fintech also called Ryft), the company’s aim is to provide businesses with an agile alternative to the established cloud giants like Snowflake, Microsoft and Databricks. 

In the words of Ryft’s CEO, “Companies want to move faster and build the right foundation for AI, but they can’t afford to get bogged down in complicated infrastructure”. Built directly on Apache Iceberg, an open-source framework for data organisation, the platform allows e-commerce and other businesses to handle data lifecycle management and maintain compliance with GDPR and other regulatory stipulations without being bound to a single vendor.

In November, Italian startup CommerceClarity closed a EUR 2.7m pre-seed round for its platform, developed to optimise how retailers make use of their product data. As with Cernel, CommerceClarity was inspired by the awareness that sub-optimal data management – for example, disorganised databases, inconsistent asset labelling and the use of outdated software – can fundamentally compromise how AI agents operate.

CommerceClarity seeks to mitigate the “operational pain of scaling large e-commerce businesses” by deploying agents which automate data ingestion and validation, resulting in coherent, AI-ready assets – a process which the startup claims can reduce operational costs by up to 90%. 

Australian order management software company Fluent Commerce has enjoyed one of the biggest recent windfalls in the digital commerce data space, raising AUD 46m in February. The substantial size of the investment reflects the company’s status as a leading e-commerce services platform, with the likes of LVMH and L’Oreal among its users. 

The Fluent platform optimises how such businesses manage customer and inventory data, enabling accurate demand forecasting and fulfilment. The new investment will allow the company to accelerate the development of new products. These include its recently launched AI-powered tool which carries out A/B testing sourcing options to predict their impact on delivery costs and net margins.

With the Digital Commerce playbook being re-written at a breakneck pace, it’s natural to wonder whether this is the right time to pursue an exit or fundraise. Our industry insiders can provide the critical guidance to steer you and your business to its next phase, so if you’re an e-commerce founder or senior executive please reach out to our Sector Principal Ralph Hübner to get the conversation started. 

For more e-commerce market insights, as well as expert commentary on deal drivers and acquisitions in sectors such as Autotech, Enterprise Software and IT & Business Services, download our M&A market reports. Don’t forget to subscribe so you’re automatically notified when our next reports are published in 2026 and beyond.