For the past decade, building an online commerce business meant choosing between two paths. You could rent space on someone else’s platform, gaining access to customers but giving up control. Or you could try to build your own, hiring engineers, stitching together tools, and navigating payments, fraud, and logistics on your own.

Today, people sell through communities, live streams, drops, DMs, auctions, social feeds, and more. But the infrastructure hasn’t kept up. Sellers are still forced to choose between limited website builders or rigid marketplaces that control the customer relationship, data, and experience. 

Communities and commerce

The three of us met at Snap, working on social products like Stories and Friending. During that time, we were part of a company-wide Google Group called Off Topic, which functioned like an internal Craigslist. Employees listed everything from chairs and boxes to concert tickets, watches, and even cars. Transactions happened quickly because there was built-in comfort that came from buying and selling in a high-trust group.

This piqued our interest in marketplaces. Whenever a group of people gathers around a shared interest like sneakers, vintage tees, trading cards, or golf gear, buying and selling naturally follow. Communities create commerce.

District empowers anyone to build a commerce business their own way

District is an AI commerce platform built around one idea: anyone should be able to build their own commerce business designed around how they sell today. Creators, entrepreneurs, and brands use District to launch custom, interactive experiences for their customers, inspired by how they sell on social platforms through features like live shopping and group chats, without writing code or hiring engineers. What used to require months of coding can now be built in hours with AI. By removing the technical barriers, sellers can finally build the way they want to sell on the internet.

District is officially launching in GA

For the past three years, we’ve been quietly building District. Today, District is available to anyone who wants to build, own, and scale their commerce business. 

Getting started is simple: describe your business, idea, or vision to the AI Builder, and District will generate a production-ready commerce platform tailored to how you want to sell, whether that includes live streams, auctions, paid subscriptions, marketplaces, or more. Sellers keep more control of their platform, customers, and revenue. District provides the infrastructure. The result is commerce that adapts to the seller, not the other way around. 

Over 1,000 businesses are powered by District today, including NikNax, Stacked Golf, Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema, Dibdit, and Midwest Box Breaks.

We’re also announcing $14.7M in seed funding, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kindred Ventures, with participation from Greylock Partners, Jaren Glover, former Depop CEO Maria Raga, Gokul Rajaram, Soleio, Deborah Liu, Imran Khan, Jacob Andreou, Peter Sellis, Josh Siegel, SV Angel, 20VC, and others. This funding allows us to continue investing in AI-driven tools, expand operational services, and scale District to support businesses of all sizes. 

Have an idea? Turn it into a production-ready commerce business in minutes.

– Eddie Koai, Patrick Mandia, and Khoi Tran