New e-commerce software company helmed by former Thrasio CTO launches with a capital-as-a-service acquisition after raising $12 million

• E-commerce software company Swiftline has bought capital provider Yardline from aggregator Thrasio.
• Swiftline has $12 million in Series A funding and provides sellers and aggregators with tools.

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

With $12 million in Series A funding, Swiftline has purchased Yardline, a capital-as-a-service provider for sellers, from major Amazon aggregator 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 that they expect to have the same type of relationship with a number of Amazon and e-commerce aggregators — companies that snatch up brands and use economies of scale to turn them into multimillion-dollar businesses.

Anthony Johnson, cofounder and CTO of Swiftline and former CTO of Thrasio, told Insider aggregators use many different tools to run their businesses effectively on Amazon. But those tools, Johnson added, "don't talk to each other or interact, or give a single set of recommendations. Very simple questions like, 'What should I do today?' become incredibly challenging," he added.

Swiftline hopes to provide easy-to-use dashboards and tools for e-commerce sellers to get insight into their businesses' performance, as well as recommendations on steps they can take to make them more profitable and when it might be time to consider exiting to an aggregator.

A lot of brands and aggregators, Johnson said, "are trying to build the technology in-house, but it's expensive, it's hard, and it takes a specific skill set, which most of them don't have."

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