Cohort (HX22) raises €3.2M to reinvent the way brands interact with their customers

Cohort, the first startup to come out of 3founders, announces it has raised 3.2 million euros in a seed round just one year after starting the project. Co-founded by Séraphie de Tracy and Nathan Barraillé, Cohort is the customer engagement platform powered by NFTs. It enables global and local brands to create innovative experiences around their products, going beyond the usual membership card or loyalty points.

As we prepare to make Cohort independent from the studio, we also celebrate this great milestone for the team!

Making web3 accessible to all

Cohort was born out of two core beliefs. The first being that web3 can bring a huge amount of innovations for brands and their customers, enabling brands to activate, acquire and reward their customers like they’ve never had before. Our second belief was that web3 should be more accessible, and to reap all of the benefits of web3 brands and their customers shouldn’t need to own crypto or a wallet, that the experience be smooth and the word web3 not even uttered!

We partnered with two incredible founders to launch the company, Séraphie de Tracy and Nathan Barraillé. Together, we worked hard to transform Cohort from an early idea to a fully-fledged company that is today raising €3.2 million seed funding led by IRIS alongside Axeleo Capital, with participation from Kima Ventures, as well as leading business angels from Payplug, Stripe, Sorare. We couldn’t be prouder to the whole team for everything they’ve accomplished in so little time.

In one year, the team has built an incredible product that we believe will become a cornerstone of marketing strategies in the year to come. With Cohort, brands can offer their customers innovative experiences powered by NFTs. In an era where customers’ expectations are skyrocketing and where brands are looking for new ways to engage with them, Cohort allows them to step into the business of experience and offer exclusive limited editions, VIP experiences, special discounts, communities etc… Cohort’s technology makes web3 accessible to all brands and customers by removing barriers to adoption with a “no-code, no-crypto, no-wallet” solution.

Building the future of customer relationships

For too many people web3 only rhymes with speculation. At 3founders, we believe that web3 is an internet feature that allow users to own digital objects, value, and data and thus can bring immense innovation to a wide variety of industry. Cohort exemplifies this for the marketing & e-commerce industry, the team has cracked a web3 use-case that is bringing innovation to brands across the world.

By using web3 technology, Cohort brings unique benefits to brands & their customers that they didn’t have before:

- Customer can now fully own their digital experiences and assets created by the brand, which was impossible in the traditional marketing world. With Cohort, these benefits are directly owned by the customer and open up new ways for brands to incentivize them.

- Simplified collaboration unlocks limitless marketing innovation. Web3 enables applications to communicate with each other without writing a single line of code. With Cohort, brands can do collaborations much more easily and users can use their assets anywhere they want (i.e. Use their perks with another shop, transfer their membership card…), at no extra cost.

- Built-in privacy makes customer interactions future-proof. With Cohort, data is owned by the user, the customer can decide when and where to share data with brands and businesses.

One year of incredible traction

In just one year the team has achieved some pretty incredible things. They’ve launched their product and have been releasing features every single month. They’ve closed over 15 clients including prominent retail brands like Etam, Adore Me… They’ve launched their Shopify App: the first no-code app to create NFTs and offer web3 experiences within a Shopify store. And finally, they’ve recruited a brilliantly talented team who all share the same mission.

Cohort’s growth is nothing short of amazing and today’s funding round is a huge accomplishment for the team. It’s a bittersweet moment for us as a studio because it means that the company becomes fully independent from us. We sat side-by-side to the Cohort team for an entire year in our office rue Ambroise Thomas. Altogether as a team we helped build the first version of the product, get our first customers, and define the long-term vision to position Cohort as the go-to NFT-marketing platform for brands. We worked hard, and also enjoyed some unforgettable moments at our Demotimes where we saw the idea transform to what Cohort is today. They’ve got everything to go further than we could ever imagine — but as always, we won’t be very far.