FIREWORK

Vincent Yang and Jerry Luk founded Firework in 2018 after seeing what was happening with short-form video in China — Douyin (TikTok's Chinese counterpart) was turning casual video into a commerce engine that was generating billions in transactions. Yang and Luk believed Western brands would want the same capability but on their own turf rather than inside a social media platform they don't control.

They started by building an SDK that any retail website could embed to run shoppable short video and live streaming on their own domain. Early traction with major US retailers proved the concept.

Firework sells a video commerce platform to enterprise brands and retailers. Clients pay a SaaS subscription to access the full platform, which includes short-form video hosting, live shopping technology, product catalog integration, and analytics.

Firework also charges based on usage and video engagement volumes. The pitch to enterprise sales teams is clear: video on your website drives 2-3x higher conversion rates than static product pages, and you own all the customer data.

The Firework platform offers three main products: Shoppable Short Video (brands upload or create short videos that viewers can tap to purchase from directly), Live Shopping (hosted live streams embedded on brand websites with real-time product purchasing), and One-to-One Video Commerce (a virtual personal shopping experience connecting individual customers with brand representatives via live video). All three integrate with major e-commerce platforms and include built-in analytics.

Firework went straight for enterprise. Rather than building a consumer app, they built an enterprise SaaS that plugs into existing e-commerce infrastructure — Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, SAP.

They signed major retail clients including Walmart, Samsung, Petco, and American Eagle, which gave them the logo credibility needed to close more deals. They also expanded internationally into Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, where live commerce adoption is further along than in the US.

Social platforms are now in the same game. TikTok Shop launched in the US in 2023, and Instagram and YouTube have both built native shopping into their video features.

These platforms come with built-in audiences of hundreds of millions. Firework's value proposition — owning the customer relationship and data — is real, but it requires brands to generate their own traffic.

That is hard and expensive. Enterprise sales cycles are also long and slow, which compresses growth velocity.

SoftBank Latin America Fund led the $150 million Series B in 2021. IDG Capital and other Asia-focused investors participated in earlier rounds, reflecting Firework's vision for the Asian commerce market.