This investor deck helped an entrepreneur raise $3.3 million to build ‘the Bloomberg terminal’ for online sellers


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  • Paul Palmieri, the former founder of mobile adtech company Millennial Media and VC firm Grit Capital, just raised $3.3 million in seed round funding for his latest venture, Tradeswell.
  • Tradeswell is an e-commerce trading platform that says it integrates all of a brand’s e-commerce channels, and consolidates marketing, retail, inventory, logistics, forecasting, lifetime value, and financials across these channels in one platform.
  • The company says it can help traditional and DTC brands save millions of dollars in outsourced contracts and tap into the booming e-commerce market.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

After adtech and venture capital, media vet Paul Palmieri is taking on e-commerce.

The former founder of mobile ad tech company Millennial Media and VC firm Grit Capital just raised $3.3 million in seed round funding for his latest venture, Tradeswell, from Signalfire and Construct Capital— a real-time e-commerce trading platform that he calls “the Bloomberg terminal for e-commerce.” 

Palmieri said he decided to join Tradeswell as CEO based on his experience as a VC investor, when he says he passed on investing in dozens of DTC companies because they had thin s and their businesses weren’t scalable.

Tradeswell says it gives brands a comprehensive look at their e-commerce business across channels including Amazon, Google, Shopify, and Target by consolidating marketing, retail, inventory, logistics, forecasting, lifetime value and financials across these channels in one platform and automating their insights, actions and decisions using machine learning. This way, they know what to sell to whom, where, and at what price, with visibility into customer data from consultants, third-party platforms, and walled gardens.

Tradeswell is a SaaS company that makes money by licensing its platform.

Tradeswell has e-commerce experts from companies including Verizon and Flywheel Digital and has worked with more than 100 brands over the past 15 months, including Ox Tools, McCormick’s, and Rare Beauty.

For example, Tradeswell claims that a salt-producer brand could improve its forecast accuracy for topline sales from 25% to 70% when it used the platform and realized that it needed to factor in the on-hand inventory from Amazon for the right projections, according to Palmieri. In another use case, a brand may use it to better understand its marketing, optimizing not just for return on ad spend (ROAS) but net s, he said.

The platform promises to help traditional and DTC brands save millions of dollars in outsourced contracts and tap into the booming e-commerce market in the US by bringing their siloed black boxes of data sitting across sales, marketing, finance and logistics channels on one platform. US e-commerce is set to be worth $1 trillion by 2023, according to a recent report by Insider Intelligence’s eMarketer.

While there are other specialty e-commerce agencies and platforms catering to individual aspects of e-commerce like inventory management platform Skubana, Palmieri said that Tradeswell was the first to unify all these elements.

“E-commerce could be a trillion-dollar opportunity but no one yet has built anything for the benefit of brands,” he said. “Tradeswell is like an AI layer that allows brands that trade goods on multiple channels to have a single platform that serves them — they get not just data, but also the context around that.”

Here’s how the startup pitched itself to investors including Signalfire and Construct Capital to raise its seed round.

Find more pitch decks in our searchable PITCH DECK LIBRARY here.

Tradeswell outlines the booming e-commerce opportunity.



Tradeswell


It says it’s trying to solve the problem of marketing, retail, inventory, logistics, forecasting, lifetime value and financials all operating in silos at brands.



Tradeswell


The pitch says that those silos lead to waste and lost s.



Tradeswell


It explains how unlike competitors, it focuses on several functions.



Tradeswell


It also highlights the challenges that brands face in integrating commerce data in real-time.



Tradeswell


Tradeswell says it uses machine learning to help customers.



Tradeswell


Tradeswell says it helps brands optimize their performance in real-time.



Tradeswell


A case study features a client saying Tradeswell helped it save $65,000 in agency fees while giving it more control.



Tradeswell


The company says it helps boost brands’ business overall.



Tradeswell


Tradeswell says it has e-commerce experts from companies including Verizon and Flywheel Digital.



Tradeswell


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