A team with deep commerce roots building the AI-native future

Chord was founded in 2021 by Bryan Mahoney and Henry Davis — former Glossier executives who witnessed firsthand how fragile and fragmented commerce data infrastructure could be. Building data systems at Glossier, they saw that properly modeled data was the difference between a team that moved fast and one that was perpetually stuck waiting for answers.

When they left, they set out to solve the fundamental problem: commerce brands were drowning in tools but starving for insight. Data was scattered across 15+ platforms, each giving a partial view. AI was hype without substance — flashy demos that fell apart the moment they touched real business data. And operators were stuck stitching together dashboards instead of growing their business.

Chord was built to fix that. Not by adding another tool, but by building the foundation underneath all the tools: a unified data layer, a context system that makes AI trustworthy, and agents that actually do the work.

The brands Chord works with — Sonos, Blue Bottle Coffee, Rodan + Fields, and others — don't have the luxury of a 50-person data team. Chord gives them the infrastructure that the best tech companies build internally, without requiring them to build it themselves.