If you have built a commerce product in the last decade, you have probably run into the same wall we did: the moment you needed to do more than one shape — sell direct and through partners, run a storefront and a marketplace, charge upfront and on renewal — the stack underneath stopped helping you.
The category we are in is full of platforms that each do one shape well. Shopify for direct, Mirakl for marketplaces, Stripe Billing for subscriptions, Elastic Path for composable storefronts, ServiceNow for procurement portals. None of them are bad. They are also not composable with each other, and the seams between them are where every ambitious commerce team ends up bleeding time.
The thesis
We are betting that the next generation of commerce platforms looks like infrastructure, not apps. The same primitives — identity, catalog, ledger, workflows — power marketplaces, storefronts, point-of-sale, subscriptions and exchanges. The shape changes; the layer underneath doesn't.
That layer is VenduStack. The shapes that ride on it are VenduPlace (marketplaces) and VenduSite (storefronts and POS). Both speak to the same core. Both adopt or replace any piece of it independently.
A platform is not features. It is the shape of the primitives.
What the layer actually does
VenduStack is six things, exposed as APIs and as services you can self-host hooks against:
- Identity — one graph for buyers, sellers, operators, partners
- Catalog — a flat model with variants and bundles on top
- Orchestration — a workflow engine for the real flow of value
- Ledger — double-entry, multi-party, auditable
- Intelligence — pricing, ranking, fraud, recommendations
- Interop — connectors to whatever you already run
Most commerce stacks today ship a small subset of these well, and require you to assemble the rest. We thought there was room to ship all six well, behind one consistent API, and let the shapes (marketplace, storefront, POS, subscription portfolio) be configurations on top.
Why now
Three things changed in the last 18 months that make this possible:
- Composable commerce stopped being a marketing term. Real teams are shipping headless storefronts at scale; the primitives are agreed upon.
- Identity got verifiable. KYB, KYC, sanctions, audit — all of these moved from compliance afterthoughts to product surfaces with real standards.
- EU sovereignty matters. A meaningful number of customers will pay a premium for EU-native infrastructure they can audit. We are betting that grows.
What we are not building
We are not building a Shopify killer. We are not building a Stripe killer. We are not building a payment processor, a tax engine, or a logistics network. We integrate with all of those — and we let you swap them, because that is the entire point of being infrastructure.
What we are building is the layer underneath, the one that keeps every commerce shape coherent across every channel. The boring, important part.
What's next
We are in design-partner mode through v1.0. If you are running commerce across more than one shape and the seams are slowing you down — talk to us. We will tell you honestly whether the timing is right.
M. Aubry is a co-founder & CEO of VenduSys. Previously: platform engineering at three commerce companies. Based in Paris.