From a Wedding Suit to a Social Commerce Revolution
Every great startup has an origin story, and Gamitee’s is refreshingly human. Jonathan Abraham, one of the company’s co-founders, was planning his wedding and needed to pick out a suit. He enlisted family members to help — only to find his inbox flooded with suggestions and his browser drowning in open tabs. The chaos of group decision-making online had no elegant solution. That frustration became the seed of an idea.
Abraham teamed up with Michael Levinson and Tom Zelazny to found Gamitee in Jerusalem, Israel, around 2016–2017. Their premise was simple but powerful: almost every major purchase decision in real life is a group decision — yet online shopping is almost entirely designed for the individual. Gamitee set out to fix that.
What Gamitee Does
Gamitee developed a social e-commerce plugin — a lightweight piece of technology that businesses could embed directly into their websites. Once integrated, the plugin allows shoppers to invite friends and family into a shared, real-time browsing session without ever leaving the retailer’s site.
Within this shared session, users can build wish lists together, chat about products, vote on options, and ultimately make purchasing decisions as a group. The experience essentially turns a standard e-commerce or travel booking website into a mini social platform — one where conversations happen organically around products, rather than on a separate social network.
For online travel agencies (OTAs), airlines, and retailers, the appeal went beyond the user experience. Gamitee’s social plug-in converted on average five times more visitors into buyers compared to a travel site’s baseline, translating to roughly a 10% increase in online sales.
The Problem It Was Solving
To understand why Gamitee mattered, it helps to understand the gap it was filling.
Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook had become central to how people discovered products. Retailers spent heavily on these platforms to drive traffic — but once shoppers arrived on a website, the social experience vanished. Group decisions still happened, but they took place over WhatsApp, phone calls, or in person, completely outside the merchant’s view. That meant lost data, lost conversions, and lost opportunities.
According to co-founder Michael Levinson, e-commerce sites lacked information on user behavior and decisions that took place offline. Gamitee wanted to help e-commerce sites keep as much of the decision process online as possible, where it could be tested and analyzed.
By bringing the conversation back onto the retailer’s own platform, Gamitee gave merchants something invaluable: visibility into how groups actually shop together.
Early Traction in Travel and E-Commerce
Gamitee initially focused on the travel industry, where group decision-making is especially complex. Planning a trip with friends or family involves coordinating preferences, comparing options, and reaching consensus — tasks that are genuinely difficult to do across fragmented communication channels.
Gamitee created a platform that could be embedded on travel booking websites, enabling users to easily share, plan, discuss, and book trips in groups. This positioned the company as a compelling partner for online travel agencies looking to reduce drop-off rates and improve the booking experience.
The company was also recognized by Amadeus, a major travel technology company, as one of 14 travel tech startups to watch in 2021 — a meaningful signal of its potential within the industry.
Rebranding as Joyned
In September 2021, Gamitee rebranded as Joyned and simultaneously announced a $4 million seed funding round. The name change was deliberate. CEO Jonathan Abraham explained that “Gamitee” means “joined” in Hebrew, but the company decided to spell it “joy” because it aims to spark joy in its customers’ experiences.
The rebrand reflected more than a name change. By 2021, the company had expanded its vision beyond travel to serve a broader range of e-commerce retailers. The new identity captured the company’s evolving mission: not just enabling group shopping, but making the entire online commerce experience more joyful and human.
Rather than helping e-commerce companies advertise better on social media, Joyned enables retailers to offer a collaborative shopping experience directly from their websites, without relying on external social platforms. Merchants could integrate the technology via a simple JavaScript snippet — plug-and-play compatible with Shopify and other major platforms — adding a “shop with me” button that opens a shared cart, mood board, and live chat with friends.
Funding and Investors
The $4 million seed round that accompanied the rebrand brought notable names into the company’s orbit. Leading the round were Arthur Stark, former president of Bed Bath & Beyond; Yair Goldfinger, founder of Dotomi and ICQ; and Rafael Ashkenazi, managing director and executive chairman at Hard Rock Digital. Each investor brought deep retail, technology, and consumer expertise — a strategic fit for a company targeting the U.S. retail market.
Over time, Joyned raised a total of $15 million in funding, backed by a diverse group of investors including BasisTech, Lucerne Investment Partners, and others.
Why It Matters
Gamitee — now Joyned — represents a broader shift in how the e-commerce industry thinks about the customer journey. For years, the assumption was that online shopping is a solitary act. Gamitee challenged that assumption, and the data backed them up.
Group shoppers tend to convert at higher rates. Decisions made collaboratively tend to stick. And retailers who provide a social shopping environment gain access to behavioral data that solo browsing can never reveal.
In an era where retailers increasingly depend on third-party platforms for social engagement, Gamitee offered an alternative: own the social experience yourself, on your own site, with your own data.
Conclusion
What began as a founder’s frustration with wedding planning became a startup that rethought the fundamental architecture of online commerce. Gamitee’s journey — from a small Jerusalem team building a social plugin for travel sites, to a venture-backed company rebranded as Joyned with global retail ambitions — illustrates how identifying a genuine human problem can lead to meaningful technological innovation.
As digital commerce continues to evolve, the insight at the heart of Gamitee’s story remains relevant: people make decisions together, and the platforms that acknowledge that truth are the ones most likely to earn lasting loyalty.