Introducing Ekyam.Ai, led by former Eloquii CEO Mariah Chase

Today, we are thrilled to announce our lead investment in Ekyam.Ai’s $2M seed round with participation from Greycroft as featured in Fortune.

Ekyam is an AI-first middleware platform founded by Mariah Chase and Abi Sachdeva, designed to power a real-time, unified view of inventory for modern commerce businesses.

As a serial entrepreneur, Ekyam is Mariah’s third start-up, with her most recent exit being Walmart’s nine figure acquisition of Eloquii in 2018, four years post launch.

Eloquii was not only one of Female Founders Fund’s initial investments in 2014, but also our first exit. As a major milestone, we are thrilled to back Mariah as our first repeat founder investment along with Mariah’s Series A lead investor, Greycroft.

With Ekyam, Mariah has teamed up with her previous CTO Abi Sachdeva, a seasoned technology leader who scaled mobile commerce at QVC post-acquisition by Send The Trend and went on to lead technology at billion dollar brands like 1–800-Flowers and Tory Burch.

Together, they are building the solution they wish they had in their respective roles leading commerce businesses: an AI-native integration layer that eliminates the friction of siloed systems — no APIs required — providing a real-time source of truth for inventory management bringing efficiency, visibility, and speed to retailers navigating increasingly complex inventory operations.

With strong early traction, Mariah and Abi are poised to redefine how modern retail runs behind the scenes. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with them as they build the future of commerce infrastructure.

Read more in our conversation with Mariah below.

Founder Story & Background

How did you and Abi first meet, and what made you decide to partner again for Ekyam?

Abi and I met at my first start up (his second after Rent the Runway) called Send the Trend. It was a legitimately terrible business, but Abi’s engineering prowess enabled us to sell to QVC and return a profit to all investors. He contacted me about a year ago, told me he was building something and asked if I wanted to be involved. I was still focused on running another consumer business so I initially jumped on board as an advisor. Abi is brilliant, has lived through every possible retail technology battle and is the most determined problem solver I’ve probably ever met. He always finds a way. About six weeks ago, I got too excited to stay on the sidelines and realized this is the way I want to participate in the retail ecosystem right now.

Were there any specific pain points you encountered at Walmart (or in past roles) that directly inspired the idea for Ekyam?

If you’ve worked a week in retail, you lived some version of the problems Ekyam solves. An acute example I remember was a major 3PL migration where our two lead engineers left with only about 70% of the multi-month project completed, setting us back at least six weeks and costing us delay payments to both the old and new 3PL. Anything non-emergent and everything on our tech roadmap got pushed to the side while our remaining (and very stressed) engineers had to dive into the APIs. A more chronic example involved the daily drip, drip, drip of disconnected inventory — multiple permutations of overselling, missing business because of stockouts, having to cancel orders and offer appeasements to unhappy customers. On a daily basis it didn’t feel like a lot but when you took stock of it over a quarter or year, it could be 50–75bps of revenue and margin. That is insane. Annually, it’s a $350BN problem for US and Canadian retail.

Vision & Problem-Solving

For a non-technical business leader, how would you explain Ekyam? What’s the core problem you’re solving?

Ekyam is an AI powered middleware (or IPaaS — integration platform as a service). Middleware provides the plumbing to connect technology silos (ERP, OMS, Shopify, WMS, returns providers) and allow the data in each of these silos to be translated and transmitted to the other silos in a cogent and usable form on an ongoing basis. In any business, this is a need to have, not a nice to have — i.e. if you’re running a retailer, you need your 3PL to “talk” to your ERP and your ecommerce platform so you know how much inventory you’ve purchased, how much was received and when, how much you have to sell, how much sold and in which channels, etc. Ekyam uses AI to connect and integrate systems to act as a single source of truth of inventory, across all channels, down to the SKU level, in real time.

What current solutions exist in the market today, and why is Ekyam a better alternative?

The incumbents in the market were all built between 2000–2013, before today’s AI and LLMs. They offer integrations that require a lot of ongoing resources — whether it’s engineers (APIs and/or ETL field mapping) or capital (for expensive licenses). Ekyam offers a fully managed, no code integration of tech silos (Netsuite, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, Snowflake, etc), robust data orchestration and a library of AI agents that can leverage data to provide business insights, operational efficiencies and drastically reduce rote manual work, etc.

Or, if you’ve homegrown your middleware, which we did at ELOQUII, I would imagine you’re living in a world of many, many APIs and maybe a little duct tape. This also requires a lot of engineers to maintain, update, fix, host, query, etc. There are no APIs with Ekyam’s unified connectors.

What’s the biggest misconception about commerce infrastructure that you’re hoping to change?

I remember being told, as a retail leader, that I should just focus on my merchandise and marketing and allow our tech (especially backend) to be just “good enough”. Knowing what I know now, I’m kicking myself. I left real revenue and EBITDA on the table. I think the message should be: prioritize the marginal efficiency of your backend so that you can make more money off of your amazing merchandise and marketing. The ROI can be extraordinary.

Go-To-Market & Impact

Who is your target customer? Are you focusing on a specific segment first?

Enterprise players in the retail ecosystem. These businesses often have multiple ERPs, 3PLs, and have accumulated tech debt via rapid growth — either via omni, acquisitions, wholesale partnerships or geographical expansion. They often have small armies of engineers, both internal and external, as well as significant costs associated with their current middleware solutions (they often have more than one). Of course, if you’re a non-enterprise sized retailer and experiencing integration pain or some version of “excel hell”, definitely reach out. We can help!

What are some tangible use cases that illustrate Ekyam’s value? How are you helping businesses improve efficiency, cut costs, or grow revenue?

We’re working with a multi-billion dollar brand that had a large data migration they estimated would take their current middleware provider 5 months. We completed it in 2 weeks. This is a 90% improvement in efficiency and allowed their team to focus on the business.

We’ve also automated the entire reconciliation process for an omni apparel business by integrating Snowflake purchase order data with pack slips from Dropbox, instantly identifying discrepancies and updating their ERP in real time. What once took hours daily now happens automatically, saving them hundreds of hours each month.

We’re also using our AI powered EDI solution to help a multi-billion dollar apparel business transition from their inefficient and labor intensive homegrown solution.

Company Building & Growth

What are some lessons from your past companies that you’re applying to Ekyam?

Go fast but mitigate obvious downside risk (i.e. buy the insurance and ace those compliance tests). Know your strengths and push those as far as you can. Ask questions until you’re blue in the face or you’ve worn down your fingerprints on GPT (or Gemini or Perplexity, etc).

As a third-time founder, how has your approach to company-building changed?

I care a lot less about what people think or say. With my prior businesses, I wanted to please or impress people and now, I really don’t care. I care that we’re providing an incredible value to the retail ecosystem and that our customers are extremely satisfied with our solution. That’s where my energy is focused. I’m also more impervious to the bad things that will inevitably happen as we build — i.e. an optimistic cockroach! Lastly, I took liberties with my health the last couple of go rounds and that’s a non-starter this time.

Fundraising & Future Outlook

What’s been the biggest surprise (or challenge) in launching Ekyam?

The biggest challenge is that Ekyam has a lot of downstream technological and business benefits and summing that up in a nice, tidy sound bite is tough — and more, can blur or devalue the complexity and heterogeneity of the problems as well as the depth and breadth of the solution that Abi and our team have built.

Where do you see Ekyam in five years? What’s your long-term vision?

Ekyam is the go-to middleware solution for the retail ecosystem, or as Abi likes to say, “Shopify for middleware” and as a result, we’re also a leader in AI agents and agentic AI for commerce.

Learn more about Ekyam on their website here or via FFF’s Exclusive in Fortune.