The rapid growth of newly emerging DTC brands and disruption in social commerce has driven a lack of visibility into what’s driving consumer interest across product categories. Traditional measurement solutions are consistently less comprehensive as the ecosystem becomes increasingly fragmented, leaving a gap in understanding which brands and products are capturing consumer attention and wallet share.
Charm.io solves this lack of visibility by providing cross-channel e-commerce insights and SKU-level data for over 4 million DTC brands and TikTok Shops. Utilizing proprietary “discovery” crawlers combined with AI models, Charm identifies, analyzes and scores every e-commerce brand online across critical performance metrics like social awareness, distribution, ad exposure and revenue growth.
This breadth and depth of data make Charm an indispensable tool for data-driven decision making for retailers looking to optimize their assortment with the most relevant brands and products, consumer investors looking to source and diligence opportunities based on brand lifecycle and market traction, and enterprise sales teams who want to target prospects that match their ICP.
For brands, Charm.io provides a comprehensive solution to track and analyze performance across multiple e-commerce platforms. By integrating SKU-level data and advanced machine learning models, the insights offered by their platform inform customer social, advertising, product development and sales strategies.
We invested in Charm.io because of the proven background the founding team has in commercialization of data analytics, their proprietary models and strong data moat, and their unique positioning to capitalize on the significant growth in the fast-evolving AI content driven commerce landscape.
The multi-billion-dollar business is to capture analytics on new forms of digital commerce enabled by AI (ex., short form video, brands easily published to any digital content product or platform).
That is the “AI trade” as short form video grows.
The company is already supporting some of the world’s largest brands and CPGs with data to win on TikTok Shop.
For some perspective on the short form video market opportunity:
TikTok Shop’s revenue was over $28.7B B globally in 2024 (and $7.3B in just the US). There are certain forecasts that TikTok Shop will generate over $100B next year, and retailers do not have visibility to what products consumers are buying on this platform to inform their merchandising strategies.
Charm.io is proving adoption within enterprises and has an unfair “in” to strategic customers thanks to their first investors, Duo Partners who founded NPD Group and recently sold the business as a part of a $1.2B transaction with Ares Capital, Hellman & Friedman, and Vestar.
The long-tailed opportunity is to expand on their collection of first party data from brands. Here they see an opportunity to follow the Glassdoor model — incentivize brands to share data to see others data and to control their own accuracy.
The other massive benefit these brands get is exposure to the world’s leading retailers/marketplaces and investors — driving immediate revenue growth opportunities through distribution, as well as capital opportunities through investment.
The team, led by Alex Nisenzon and Ari Horowitz includes highly proficient engineers and data scientists with extensive experience in e-commerce data analytics and commercialization. Alex previously spent 7 years at Similarweb (NYSE: SMWB) where he held a variety of strategic roles.
Charm.io has seen strong customer interest and revenue growth. They tripled their contracted ARR base in 2024, and are now serving some of the largest enterprises across each of their key customer verticals. In the following years, Charm.io expects to increase customer penetration with expansion into new geographical markets, extend coverage to additional e-commerce platforms, and further enhance its analytics capabilities with AI.
They apply machine learning models to process the disparate signals into their composite scores (Growth, Success & Sophistication) for every brand to provide their contextual performance vs the market. For the TikTok Shop capability, they partnered with a team that is ex-ByteDance (they were on the product team that built TikTok Shop and Douyin) — and they manage the collection of the product sales data on TikTok Shop.
The collected data is then modeled out against specific videos on TikTok (so users can understand how much revenue was driven by each video) and channels (ex., pre-recorded videos, live streams, and the TikTok shop shopping mall).
The billion-dollar play is to create a cross-channel perspective on every brand’s e-commerce performance — down to SKU level sales. Achieving that makes their data intelligence a must-have for every relevant industry.
We have high conviction in the path to realizing that vision, but from a practical perspective with a limited engineering team, it just takes time.
The great news is that they started with the DTC ecosystem, which is the most fragmented and hardest to track. But now adding additional capabilities for each channel (different marketplaces, etc.), and more importantly connecting the brand view across those channels, is a massive data engineering effort.
The rise of new direct-to-consumer businesses on any digital/social commerce, particularly fueled by AI’s content generation capabilities (as we are seeing, and will continue to unfold through platforms like TikTok), creates a massive opportunity for Charm.io.
With TikTok’s revenue already exceeding $28B in 2024 and projected to grow exponentially, Charm.io’s TikTok Shop analytics and e-commerce performance tracking are well-positioned to capture a significant portion of the fast-growing digital commerce sector.
The company is forming strategic partnerships and has enterprise appeal, and Charm.io is already engaging with high-profile, proving the value of their insights. Its AI-driven analytics for TikTok, combined with data from other platforms, creates a must-have tool for these brands.
Reach out to me if you would like to get connected to the team.
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