Serial entrepreneur joins forces with AI commerce platform to help brands create interactive commerce experiences
Gary Vaynerchuk, serial entrepreneur, investor, and digital marketing pioneer, and District, an AI commerce platform, announced a strategic partnership to advance the future of online commerce. As part of the partnership, Vaynerchuk will serve as an advisor to District, bringing his conviction in community-driven commerce and his expertise in live selling, brand building and digital culture to the company.
Vaynerchuk brings both his experience building VaynerX into a global enterprise and his track record of early bets on companies like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Venmo, Coinbase, and Uber. As a strategic advisor, he will provide guidance to the District team as the platform scales, opening doors with enterprise brands and larger commerce businesses looking to own their customer relationships. Pairing Vaynerchuk’s strategic acumen with District’s technology, the partnership will connect brands with the infrastructure that leverages commerce-AI agents to rapidly build custom live shopping platforms that they own outright, complete with multi-casting, buy-now listings, real-time and multi-day auctions, flash sales, and other next-generation commerce formats.
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“Too many brands and creators are building on platforms where they don’t actually own the customer relationship. That’s a vulnerability,” said Gary Vaynerchuk. “What I love about District is they’re giving people the infrastructure to own the community, the commerce, and the attention all in one place. That’s where this is all going, and that’s why I’m excited to be involved.”
“Gary has an unmatched ability to see where attention and behavior are going before the rest of the market,” said Eddie Koai, CEO and co-founder of District. “He immediately understood that commerce is shifting toward live, social, and community-first experiences, and that businesses need to own those relationships. That’s exactly what we’re building. Having Gary’s perspective as we grow is incredibly valuable.”
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Brands are prioritizing direct relationships with their audiences, communicating with them through community chats, DMs, subscriber channels, live-selling and more. Building those experiences has historically required months of coding and teams of engineers. With District, brands use their proprietary AI commerce technology to create custom, interactive commerce experiences all in a single platform – giving them full ownership of their customer relationships and data, and the flexibility to innovate and test new selling methods without building from the ground up.
District recently launched in general availability after building for three years and has already grown to power over 1,000 businesses. The company has raised $14.7M in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kindred Ventures with participation from Greylock Partners, former Depop CEO Maria Raga, Gokul Rajaram, and others.
In the coming months, District and Vaynerchuk plan to collaborate on initiatives designed to help sellers build, grow, and own their businesses in this new era of commerce.
