According to TechCrunch, Spangle, an AI e-commerce startup founded by former Bolt CEO Maju Kuruvilla, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round. This new investment, led by NewRoad Capital Partners, values the company at $100 million. The Seattle-based company, which came out of stealth just last March, now has nine enterprise customers, including major fashion retailers Revolve, Alexander Wang, and Steve Madden. The startup claims its platform has driven close to a 50% increase in revenue per visit for brands using it, and it quadrupled its own annualized revenue in Q4 of last year. Spangle’s core tech, called ProductGPT, builds personalized shopping pages in real-time based on a shopper’s context. The round brings Spangle’s total funding to $21 million.
The Blank Page Gamble
Here’s the thing that really caught my attention. Spangle’s whole premise is sending shoppers to a blank page. That’s a wild concept in e-commerce, where brands have spent decades optimizing every pixel of a product page. But Kuruvilla’s bet is that static pages are becoming obsolete. If a customer comes from a TikTok ad, a Pinterest pin, or an AI chatbot query, why show them the same generic page you’d show a Google searcher?
So Spangle’s AI fills that void in real-time. It uses signals—where you came from, what you clicked—to assemble a unique page layout and product recommendations just for you. It’s a fundamentally different infrastructure play. They’re not just tweaking a recommendation carousel; they’re trying to rebuild the storefront from the ground up as an AI-native experience. And with reported metrics like a 60% improvement in return on ad spend for Revolve, it’s clearly hitting a nerve with retailers desperate for better conversion.
Why This Might Actually Be The Right Time
Kuruvilla makes a compelling case for timing. He told TechCrunch that three shifts had to converge for Spangle to be viable: consumer comfort with AI discovery, the explosion of new traffic channels beyond Google/Meta, and the plummeting cost/latency of AI models themselves. I think he’s right. The old “build for SEO and pray” model is breaking down. Shopping is fragmenting across social apps, aggregators, and now AI agents.
His background is key here, too. A decade at Amazon on large-scale commerce and AI, then running Bolt. That combo gives him serious credibility in both the infrastructure and the messy reality of retail conversions. He’s not just an AI theorist; he’s someone who’s shipped checkout software to merchants. That experience likely shaped Spangle’s focus on being a foundational layer—what he calls a “Shopify for AI-powered commerce”—rather than another point solution.
The Big Question: Scale
Now, the elephant in the room. They have nine customers. Granted, they’re big names with combined online sales of $3.8 billion, but that’s still a tiny roster. The promise is enormous, but the proof will be in scaling this to hundreds or thousands of merchants, not just a handful of elite fashion brands. Can their AI model maintain its performance when it’s not being fed by the deep, clean catalogs of a Revolve?
Another fascinating detail: they’re doing all this with six full-time employees. That’s the modern AI startup playbook in a nutshell—leverage the foundational models and automate everything. But it also highlights how early this is. The $15 million war chest will presumably go toward building out that team, especially in sales and engineering. The real test begins now: moving from a powerful proof-of-concept with a few partners to a must-have platform for the mid-market.
Basically, Spangle is betting the entire farm on a future where every shopping session is unique and generated on the fly. It’s a bold vision. If the trend toward AI-mediated discovery accelerates as fast as Kuruvilla thinks, then static e-commerce sites will start to look very, very old-fashioned. But that’s a big “if.” For now, that $100 million valuation is a massive vote of confidence that he might just be right. You can check out what they’re building over at spangle.ai.
