With physical retail looking more akin to fallen empires, the geography of commerce has shifted.

Shopify alone hosts 8.8 million stores across the endless expanses of the internet, where each merchant is expected to satisfy instant gratification and next-day delivery. Yet, Shopify owns just 29% of the e-commerce platform share in the US.

The strange thing is that commerce, in its transition to the virtual, has become more physical than ever.

Take the journey of a single pair of shoes: raw materials sourced from a dozen countries, assembled in another, shipped across oceans, stored in warehouses, delivered to your door.

Back in mid 2022 post Brexit, Sam Atkinson and Zach Bailet saw what others missed. While others treated cross-border commerce as a problem to be minimised, Swap understood it as the fundamental condition of modern trade - the default state of a world where every sale is potentially global.

Running strategy at Juni (another Cherry company that is reshaping commerce banking), Sam had watched modern e-commerce brands transform into logistics operations with marketing departments bolted on.

When he approached us with Swap's seed round in early 2022, the vision was almost heretical: if this complexity was massively simplified, brands could focus on what matters most – their customer.

The geometry of commerce was changing - someone needed to build the infrastructure to match. We imagined that if successful, Swap could be the Rippling for e-commerce.

Within two years, Swap turned this thesis into reality. Swap's product velocity has meant they have delivered close to 8 products in 2 years across the full platform. The platform now processes over $100M in cross-border transactions annually, serving as the nervous system for 400 brands.

From their London base, they transformed Brexit's constraints into a masterclass in cross-border trade, capturing 80-90% of the UK's most ambitious brands - Pangaia, Perceival, Drakes, Nadine Merabi.

Most significantly, 60% of their customers expand into new markets within months of joining.

At Cherry, we've long believed that European technology companies can shape global markets, not just regional ones. Swap's New York office opening marks the next chapter in building the operating system for global commerce.

Now in 2025, the problems Swap set out to solve have ballooned.

E-commerce on a good day has very challenged economics. Thin margins squeezed between rising acquisition costs and customer expectations.

But against this backdrop, something remarkable happened. Shopify grew into a $150B+ company by fundamentally rewriting what commerce could be. Creators became retailers, Instagram posts became storefronts, and side hustles became major brands.

Now these millions of new merchants face an era of perpetual disruption. Trump's 20% tariffs on Chinese imports, shifting regulatory frameworks, supply chains fragmenting along geopolitical fault lines - each new friction demands operational sophistication previously reserved for global enterprises.

This collision of democratised commerce and geopolitical complexity creates unprecedented opportunity. While an entire ecosystem of billion-dollar businesses emerged in Shopify’s wake - Klaviyo transforming customer data into retail real estate, ShipBob reimagining fulfillment - the operational layer of commerce remains largely unwritten, and that's where we see Swap coming in.

As more merchants go global, and global trade grows more complex, Swap becomes a key player in the foundations of tomorrow’s generation of global brands.

With tomorrow in mind, Swap extends beyond the mundane problems of the present. Inventory systems enabled by AI to allow a digital divination - predicting where products should be before customers even know they want them. A return in France becomes an opportunity in Germany, the system learning from every transaction and movement. With a dataset rich in transaction information, customers will be further delighted with the details of insights Swap will provide.

Now, Swap's $40M Series B from ICONIQ Growth and Cherry becomes ammunition for this vision of commerce infrastructure that grows stronger as the world grows more complex.

The next decade of commerce will be defined by the invisible architecture that powers them.