Two data infrastructure startups with agentic commerce ambitions are combining forces.
On Tuesday, Chord, a 6-year-old commerce tech startup, acquired Zenlytic, an AI startup with an anthropomorphized data analyst agent named “Zoë,” for $5 million.
Chord’s co-founder and CEO, Bryan Mahoney, told AdExchanger that the combined business has around 30 full-time employees and some 60 customers, with an annual run rate nearing $10 million.
Chord launched as a “headless commerce” software company, Mahoney said.
At the time, the headless approach was catching on with Shopify merchants and social-native sellers. The idea was to decouple the front-end website from back-end fulfillment, making for a more agile business and faster-loading pages at a time when Google’s SEO prioritized speed. Shopify has since addressed the problem by taking steps to make its own storefronts faster.
Since the rise of LLMs, Chord and Zenlytic have both pivoted to become explicitly AI-based data infrastructure services. For instance, Mahoney said, Chord is now paid on a usage basis rather than traditional subscription pricing. And because pricing is usage-based, Chord closely tracks how often users prompt its AI agent for an answer – a rate that has accelerated to about once every 20 seconds, he said.
Although the more people use agents, the more ways they find to abuse them.
Mahoney pointed to a recent story in which someone figured out they could use McDonald’s online customer support and ordering agent to answer demanding math and computer science questions – a workaround to having to pay for one’s own AI tokens. (McDonald’s has since fixed this, by the way.)
Chord guards against this kind of misuse. It’s trained its AI agent with the necessary context so that off-base prompts return a response that this isn’t the right agent for the task. That includes requests to use its agent “like a therapist,” say, or for something like “make these results look better to a CFO,” Mahoney said.
Those guardrails matter more as Chord’s business shifts.
The business model is now more like an agentic version of a CDP, Mahoney said. For example, Sonos, a Chord client, can use it to track customers and enrich first-party data, such as understanding when customers are moving to a new home – an opportune time to send emails or SMS notifications about new products.
So where does Zenlytic’s Zoë fit in?
The data analyst agent “largely replaces” Chord’s own analyst agent, Mahoney said.
Guess human data analysts aren’t the only ones who need to be worried about being replaced by AI. Even agents can be put out of work.
But Chord also has other agents that work better alongside Zoë, Mahoney added. Chord has gone deeper into commerce infrastructure, for instance, with use cases geared toward Shopify-type businesses, and customers using the Snowflake data warehouse in particular. Zenlytic, by contrast, has tended to work with large enterprise brands of all kinds, not just in ecommerce, and supports many more cloud data warehouses.
The goal, Mahoney said, is for some of Zenlytic’s large customers, including Black & Decker, Verizon, J.Crew and Stanley, to adopt Chord’s data infrastructure and activation, including the ability to segment profiles or audiences for campaign targeting and measurement.
But winning over large brands requires confidence in the technology, and right now there’s an odd mix of growing trust and distrust of AI agent outputs.
Mahoney noted that the outright “hallucinations” of earlier LLMs have become relatively rare. “Now it might be more like a lucid dream,” he said. The outputs are believable and often can feel correct.
And so marketers need to be aware that a confident-sounding AI agent can still lead them badly astray. It’s a concern Mahoney shares.
“We constantly [need to] evaluate the answers that we’re getting back to make sure that the way we’re using AI is increasing confidence on a daily basis, not getting eroded,” he said. “These are some of the things that keep me up at night.”
