SpangleAI e-commerce startup founded by former Bolt CEO Maju Kuruvilla, has raised $15 million in a new funding round, bringing the company to $100 million after investment.
Led by NewRoad Capital Partners, the all-equity Series A round comes more than a year after the Seattle-based startup. raising a seed round of $6 million at $30 million in pre-money value. Madrona, DNX Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, and strategic angel investors also participated, bringing the total funding to $21 million, according to the startup.
Retailers are experiencing a shift in how consumers discover products online, as AI tools, social platforms, and recommendation engines increasingly influence purchasing decisions before shoppers even reach a brand’s website. Kuruvilla (pictured above) aims to solve this problem with Spangle – positioning it as software that helps retailers create a personalized shopping experience based on the context in which shoppers navigate their site, using AI-generated product recommendations and layouts.
Since coming out of stealth in March last year, Spangle has signed up nine company customers, including fashion retailers Revolve, Alexander Wang, and Steve Madden, whose combined online sales total about $3.8 billion, Kuruvilla said in an interview.
Traffic flowing through Spangle’s platform has grown by about 57% month-on-month, with all customers expanding their use of the software, and the startup said it saw a fourth annual profit in the fourth quarter, although it did not disclose revenue figures.
At the heart of Spangle’s approach is a simple idea: instead of sending shoppers to pre-built product or category pages, brands direct traffic to empty pages. Spangle’s AI populates the page in real-time using a proprietary model called ProductGPT, drawing on signals such as where shoppers came from, what they searched for or clicked on, and the behavior of similar visitors, to display products, recommendations, and content that are relevant to that moment.
Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that brands using Spangle have seen close to a 50% increase in revenue per visit, a doubling of ad returns, and a 15% increase in average order value.
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“We are a future-proofing brand,” said Kuruvilla, adding that Spangle trains an AI model on each retailer’s catalog and performance data, so the shopping experience can adapt automatically.
Spangle’s software has helped Revolve adapt its shopping experience in real time, driving about a 60% improvement in ad spend and a 50% increase in revenue per visit, said Ryan Pabelona, the retailer’s vice president of performance marketing.
Before starting Spangle in 2024, Kuruvilla served as CEO of One-click checkout Bolt company and before that more than ten years at Amazon, where he worked on large-scale commerce and AI systems. He co-founded the startup with CTO Fei Wang, a former Amazon lead engineer who worked on Alexa and customer service technology and later became CTO at Saks Off 5th.
Kuruvilla said his experience running a commerce and payments platform made Spangle focus on building infrastructure rather than incremental improvements. Some, he added, see the startup as a kind of Shopify for AI-powered commerce.
Spangle’s approach is also aligned with a move to shopping mediated by AI tools such as OPIC’s AAIP and some browser-based agents. As consumers increasingly rely on chatbots and automated agents to search and compare products, Kuruvilla said brands will need software that can respond dynamically to both human and machine purchases, instead of serving the same static page to each visitor.
Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that Spangle became viable only in the last two years because of three main changes: consumers became more comfortable finding products through AI tools, the rapid spread of discovery channels beyond Google and Meta, and advances in AI technology that have reduced costs and latency to produce real-time experiences. Together, he said, these changes could replace incremental improvements with AI-native trading systems that can adapt instantly as shopping behavior evolves.
Currently, Spangle has six full-time employees, emphasizing how AI tools allow startups to scale enterprise software with relatively small teams.
With the new funding, Kuruvilla said Spangle will invest more in research and development, expand its engineering team, and build its sales organization.