Fluid, the We-Commerce platform built for direct selling and relationship-based commerce, announced the completion of a $15 million funding round led by Vess Pearson, Aptive Environmental Co-Founder and CEO, who will now join Fluid’s board of directors. Alex Bean, Divvy Co-Founder, also participated in the funding round, along with strong follow-on investment from existing investors, which the company stated reflects sustained confidence in the company’s future, the product’s progress and the size of the market opportunity.
Rather than drawing from institutional capital, the funding round was driven entirely by individual entrepreneurs, operators and executives who have firsthand experience with the challenges direct selling companies face and who believe Fluid is the right platform to address them.
Pearson, who has decades of experience building and scaling relationship-based businesses, is uniquely positioned to understand the platform’s value and inform its direction. Bean also brings a complementary fintech lens to the funding round, as well as a background in payments infrastructure, financial tooling and building at scale.
“The reason I invested in Fluid is simply the product,” Pearson said. “Coming from direct sales and relationship-based businesses, I know what it takes to win in this space, and Fluid has built something genuinely impressive. Beyond that, the traction this team is putting up right now speaks for itself. I’m excited to join the board and help take it to the next level.”
A significant amount of this new capital will be directed toward expanding Fluid’s AI capabilities based on a clear conviction that AI should make human sellers better, not replace them.
“At a time when much of the technology industry is deploying AI to replace human sellers entirely, Fluid is investing in the opposite direction,” the company stated. “In a world of increasing AI, personal relationships in commerce become more important, not less. Fluid’s AI development is centered on making reps and field sellers better at what they do. That means surfacing the right information at the right time, enabling faster content creation and helping sellers stay connected with their contacts at scale, without replacing the human relationships that make direct selling work in the first place.”
The funding round comes at a period of what Fluid described as “significant momentum,” and the follow-on participation from existing investors is “not a bet on what Fluid might become. It is a reinforcement of what Fluid is already building and the progress the company has demonstrated.”
“We-Commerce has always been rooted in people,” said Mike Tingey, Fluid CEO. “Every product decision we make comes back to that, and our approach to AI is no exception. We’re not building tools to go around reps. We’re building tools that make them more effective, more confident and better equipped to do the thing that no algorithm can replicate: build a real relationship with another person.”
