For most direct-to-consumer and marketplace brands, technical debt is a familiar challenge. It shows up in codebases, in outdated platforms, in rushed launches and unscalable features. But there’s another kind of debt silently compounding behind the scenes: integration debt.

This isn’t just about bad code. It’s about fragile processes.

It’s the patchwork of APIs, manual spreadsheets, half-built workflows, and fragile exports cobbled together to make commerce operations run. It’s the data you download manually each week to reconcile sales and payments. The way finance closes the books with late nights and duplicated files. The unstable sync between inventory, ERP, and payments that works… until it doesn’t.

Integration debt is when operations don’t scale with the business, because  data doesn’t flow. And the cost of that—delays, misreporting, errors, missed opportunities—adds up fast.

Commerce Is Fragmented by Nature

Modern commerce doesn’t happen in one place. D2C brands, global retailers, and fast-scaling marketplaces operate across dozens of platforms: Shopify, Amazon, Klarna, Stripe, Netsuite, custom ERPs, third-party logistics providers, payment processors, marketplaces, and more.

Each system is great on its own. Together? Not so much.

Operators are forced to bridge the gaps—often by exporting data, importing it again, reformatting fields, and building custom logic in spreadsheets. This is the silent pain in commerce: entire teams working reactively to keep business-critical flows alive.

You’ll find CFOs building revenue reports in Excel with macros and VLOOKUPs. Ops teams manually matching SKU-level data across inventory tools. Finance relying on screenshots for end-of-month reporting.

It’s duct tape. It’s fragile. And it’s expensive.

The Strategic Cost of Doing Nothing

Every time a new sales channel is added or a system integration is delayed, the web of manual work grows. And as volume scales, so does the risk: wrong reports, broken logic, operational delays, and compliance headaches.

What’s worse is that this kind of debt doesn’t show up on the balance sheet—but it erodes margins, speed, and morale all the same.

If we’ve learned anything from working with D2C brands and modern retailers, it’s that growth without operational clarity leads to bottlenecks that don’t fix themselves.

Commerce brands today don’t need another all-in-one solution—they need infrastructure that fits how they actually work. Millentic is building exactly that.

Because the future of commerce isn’t just about new channels or better UX. It’s about making data flow the way your business already does—cleanly, confidently, and without debt.

What We’re Seeing in the Market

From our vantage point as investors, we’re seeing this across nearly every fast-scaling commerce operation: even well-funded brands are running into walls because their systems don’t speak the same language.

Brands are adding sales channels but holding back on new markets because the back-end complexity feels unmanageable.

Ops teams are hiring more people instead of fixing the workflows.

Finance is forced to delay or redo reporting because systems never fully reconcile.

And perhaps most importantly—growth starts to feel like a liability.

Integration debt quietly slows down decision-making. It hides issues until they become urgent. It makes everything more manual than it should be. And because it doesn’t show up in the budget, it’s easy to ignore—until it’s not.

We’ve spoken with CFOs who’ve missed critical financial insights because data was delayed. COOs who couldn’t respond to inventory issues quickly enough because systems weren’t syncing, which meant lost sales because of products out of stock when shoppers were ready to buy. Founders who thought their stack was best-in-class, only to realize it wasn’t built to scale. The message is clear: as brands mature, the biggest drag on their growth isn’t the front-end—it’s the flow of information behind the scenes.

Why We Backed Millentic

At Goose Valley Ventures, we back founders who know their domain inside out and are building for the workflows that actually exist. When we met Joakim and Daniel, the founders of Millentic, it was immediately clear they weren’t guessing at the problem—they’d lived it.

Their vision is grounded, focused, and built for operators who want to run lean, fast, and free from vendor lock-in. Millentic doesn’t promise magic. It offers commerce operators something better: reclaiming control of the their data flow.

The platform gives commerce teams direct, intuitive access to their data, and lets them automate the workflows they already rely on—without needing engineers, without ripping out systems, and without compromising on flexibility.

“We’ve consistently focused on building to solve the problem at its root - the fragmentation of commerce data. The solutions we’ve crafted are game-changing for commerce ops, because they allow to finally scale operations in parallel with the growth of business, without needing risky investments in integration development nor lengthy onboarding processes to over-promising monolith platforms.” - Joakim Olsson, Co-Founder and CEO at Millentic.

Millentic is the infrastructure layer we believe modern commerce deserves. It’s not a replacement for your stack. It’s the connective tissue that finally makes it work like it should.

Because the future of commerce isn’t just about launching new channels or better UX.

It’s about building smarter, more resilient operations—with data that flows cleanly, confidently, and without debt.