Spangle, the AI e-commerce startup founded by former Bolt CEO Maju Kuruvilla, has raised $15 million in a new funding round, valuing the company at $100 million.
The Series A round, led by NewRoad Capital Partners, comes more than a year after the Seattle-based startup raised a $6 million seed round at a $30 million pre-money valuation. The startup said Madrona, DNX Ventures, Streamlined Ventures and strategic angel investors also participated, bringing total funding to $21 million.
Retailers are facing a shift in the way consumers find products online, as AI tools, social platforms, and recommendation engines increasingly influence purchasing decisions before shoppers even visit a brand’s website. Kuravilla (pictured above) aims to address this problem with Spangle. We position Spangle as software that helps retailers personalize the shopping experience with real-time, AI-generated product recommendations and layouts based on the context of a shopper’s journey through the site.
Since coming out of stealth last March, Spangle has signed on nine enterprise customers, including fashion retailers Revolve, Alexander Wang and Steve Madden, with total online sales of about $3.8 billion, Kuruvilla said in an interview.
Traffic flowing through Spangle’s platform is up about 57% month over month, all customers are increasing their use of the software, and the startup said its annual revenue quadrupled in the fourth quarter, without disclosing revenue numbers.
At the heart of Spangle’s approach is a simple idea. Rather than directing shoppers to pre-built product or category pages, brands route traffic to what is essentially a blank page. Spangle’s AI fills its pages in real-time using a proprietary model called ProductGPT, using signals like where shoppers come from, what they search or click, and how similar visitors behave to show them products, recommendations, and content tailored to that moment.
Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that brands using Spangle are seeing nearly 50% more revenue per visit, doubling return on ad spend, and increasing average order value by 15%.
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“We’re future-proofing our brands,” Kuruvilla said, adding that Spangle trains an AI model based on each retailer’s catalog and performance data, allowing the shopping experience to automatically adapt.
Spangle’s software allows Revolve to adapt the shopping experience in real time, improving return on ad spend by about 60% and increasing revenue per visit by 50%, said Ryan Pavelona, the company’s vice president of performance marketing.
Before launching Spangle in 2024, Kuruvilla was CEO of one-click checkout company Bolt, and before that spent more than a decade at Amazon, working on large-scale commerce and AI systems. He co-founded the startup with CTO Fei Wang, a former principal engineer at Amazon who worked on Alexa and customer service technology and later served as CTO at Saks Off 5th.
Kuruvilla said his experience running commerce and payments platforms shaped Spangle’s focus on building infrastructure rather than incremental fixes. He added that some see the startup as a kind of Shopify for AI-powered commerce.
Spangle’s approach is also consistent with the shift to shopping through AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT 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 dynamically respond to both human shoppers and machines, rather than serving the same static page to all visitors.
Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that Spangle only became viable over the past two years, when three major changes coincided. Consumers are becoming more comfortable discovering products through AI tools, the rapid proliferation of discovery channels beyond Google and Meta, and advances in AI technology that have significantly reduced the cost and latency of producing real-time experiences. These changes, he said, have made it possible to replace incremental fixes with AI-native commerce systems that can instantly adapt to evolving shopping behaviors.
Today, Spangle has six full-time employees and highlights how AI tools have enabled startups to scale enterprise software with relatively small teams.
With the new funding, Kuruvilla said Spangle plans to further invest in research and development, expand its engineering team and build out its sales organization.
