In a significant validation of artificial intelligence’s deepening role in retail, Spangle, an AI-powered e-commerce startup founded by former Bolt CEO Maju Kuruvilla, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round, catapulting the company’s valuation to $100 million. This latest investment, led by NewRoad Capital Partners, marks a tripling of the startup’s valuation from its seed round just over a year ago and signals a major bet on AI’s capacity to redefine the online shopping experience from the ground up.
The funding round, which was entirely equity-based, saw continued support from existing investors Madrona and DNX Ventures, alongside new participation from Streamlined Ventures and a cadre of strategic angel investors. This injection brings Spangle’s total funding to $21 million, following a $6 million seed round that valued the pre-revenue company at $30 million pre-money. The rapid valuation leap reflects both the fierce investor appetite for generative AI applications and tangible early execution by Kuruvilla’s team.
The Problem: A Fractured Shopping Journey
The modern consumer’s path to purchase is no longer a straight line. For decades, the digital playbook for retailers was straightforward: optimize for search engines, run social media ads, and funnel traffic to a polished, but largely static, website. Today, that model is crumbling. The discovery phase of shopping has explosively fragmented across AI-powered tools (like chatbots and visual search), social platforms (TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping), and sophisticated recommendation engines from Amazon and Google.
“Shoppers are now being inspired and making decisions before they ever land on a brand’s homepage,” explains Kuruvilla, in an exclusive interview. “By the time they arrive, they carry immense context—what post they saw, what they asked an AI assistant, what their friend recommended. Yet, most brand websites greet them with the same generic homepage or product grid. It’s a massive disconnect that leads to abandoned carts and missed connections.”
This disconnect represents a critical pain point for retailers. With customer acquisition costs soaring and loyalty increasingly fleeting, the moment a shopper arrives on-site is a golden—and often squandered—opportunity. Traditional platforms force merchants to choose between a few rigid templates or invest millions in custom development that can’t adapt in real-time. Spangle was conceived to bridge this gap.
The Spangle Solution: The “Blank Page” Powered by AI
At the heart of Spangle’s innovative approach is a seemingly radical, yet profoundly logical, idea: replace pre-built, one-size-fits-all web pages with a dynamic, AI-generated canvas tailored to each visitor.
Here’s how it works: Instead of directing a customer who clicked a “summer dresses” Pinterest ad to a generic “Dresses” category page, a brand using Spangle would send them to what is essentially a blank slate. In milliseconds, Spangle’s proprietary AI model, dubbed ProductGPT, springs into action. It analyzes a rich stream of real-time signals: the referral source (Pinterest), the user’s click history, on-site search queries, geographic location, device type, and even the behavioral patterns of similar shoppers.
Synthesizing this data, ProductGPT dynamically generates a complete, unique shopping page. For the Pinterest visitor, it might create a layout featuring flowing maxi dresses at the top, styled with user-generated content from social media, followed by complementary accessories like sandals and sun hats that similar customers purchased. A shopper arriving from a ChatGPT query for “office-appropriate backpack for travel” would instantly see a page curated with professional, durable bags, packing cubes, and laptop sleeves.
“We’re moving from a web of static pages to a web of dynamic experiences,” Kuruvilla states. “The page itself becomes an interface to a real-time, AI-powered merchandiser that understands intent and context. It’s the difference between a recorded message and a live, personal concierge.”
From Stealth to Enterprise Adoption: Proof in the Pipeline
Since emerging from stealth mode in March 2023, Spangle has moved aggressively to prove its model. The startup has already onboarded nine enterprise customers, a roster that includes prestigious fashion names like Revolve, Alexander Wang, and Steve Madden. Collectively, these brands represent approximately $3.8 billion in annual online sales, providing Spangle with a formidable testing ground and a wealth of data.
The early results are compelling. Spangle reports that traffic flowing through its platform has grown about 57% month-over-month, indicating not only new customer acquisition but also deepening adoption by existing clients. Most notably, the startup claims it quadrupled its annualized revenue in the fourth quarter of 2023 alone, a surge driven by expanded use-cases and seat licenses within its current enterprise portfolio. While absolute revenue figures remain undisclosed, this growth trajectory underscores strong product-market fit.
For a brand like Steve Madden, the appeal lies in personalization at scale. “In footwear and accessories, style is intensely personal,” a company executive noted. “Spangle allows us to meet the customer where they are in their discovery journey, presenting the right boot or handbag based on how they found us, whether it was from a street-style blog or a celebrity red carpet look. It’s a powerful tool for converting inspiration into sales.”
The Founder’s Journey: Lessons from Bolt to ProductGPT
Maju Kuruvilla’s trajectory lends significant credibility to Spangle’s ambitions. As the former CEO of Bolt, the one-click checkout pioneer, he spent years immersed in the most critical and friction-laden moment of e-commerce: the final click before purchase. His experience gave him a front-row seat to the limitations of the existing stack.
“At Bolt, we obsessed over shaving milliseconds off checkout,” Kuruvilla reflects. “But we came to realize that by the time a customer reaches checkout, many of the most important decisions—and opportunities for engagement—have already passed. The real leverage is in the discovery and consideration experience on the site itself. That’s the space I felt was ripe for a paradigm shift with AI.”
This insight forms the philosophical core of Spangle. While Bolt streamlined the transaction, Spangle aims to enrich the entire pre-transaction journey, creating a more engaging, relevant, and ultimately satisfying experience that naturally leads to higher conversion and larger order values.
The Competitive Landscape and Market Vision
Spangle enters a crowded field of e-commerce enablement tools, but carves a distinct niche. It is not a traditional CMS (Content Management System) like Shopify or Adobe Commerce, which are built for structuring static content. It is also more expensive than a standard product recommendation engine, which typically operates as a widget within a fixed page.
Instead, Spangle operates as an AI-native experience layer. It sits between a retailer’s core commerce platform and the customer, intelligently orchestrating the entire page composition in real-time. This positions it as a potential complement to, rather than a direct replacement for, existing tech stacks.
The market opportunity is vast. As retailers grapple with the post-cookie future and the rise of AI agents, the ability to deliver unique, signal-driven experiences becomes a key competitive differentiator. Spangle’s vision extends beyond today’s web browsers. “The principles of contextual, AI-generated experiences are platform-agnostic,” Kuruvilla suggests. “Whether the endpoint is a mobile app, a voice interface, or an emerging AR environment, the need to understand intent and assemble dynamic responses will only grow.”
The Road Ahead: Scaling Intelligence
With the new $15 million in capital, Spangle plans to accelerate on three fronts. First, aggressive R&D to enhance ProductGPT’s capabilities, particularly in understanding nuanced visual and stylistic preferences. Second, the company is expanding its go-to-market team to capture more enterprise clients beyond its initial fashion stronghold, targeting sectors such as beauty, home goods, and electronics. Third, deepening integrations with the broader ecosystem of data platforms, ad networks, and social channels to enrich its contextual signal pool.
The challenge ahead is significant. Spangle must continue to demonstrate clear ROI through increased conversion rates and average order value (AOV) for its clients. It must also navigate the complexities of data privacy, ensuring its real-time personalization operates within a framework of explicit trust and transparency.
Nevertheless, the company’s rapid ascent to a $100 million valuation tells a compelling story. In an era where AI is often met with both hype and apprehension, Spangle, under the leadership of Maju Kuruvilla, is presenting a concrete and scalable application that addresses a genuine and pressing need in a multi-trillion-dollar industry. By turning the blank page from a void into a canvas for AI-powered personalization, Spangle isn’t just selling software; it’s advocating for a more intuitive, responsive, and human-centric future for online commerce itself.
Maju Kuruvilla’s new venture, Spangle, has rapidly tripled its valuation to $100 million, attracting significant investor confidence after his tenure as CEO of Bolt. The startup’s swift ascent is backed by compelling performance data directly from its client base.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Kuruvilla revealed the impactful results brands are experiencing using Spangle’s platform. The metrics are striking: companies report a revenue surge of nearly 50% per customer visit, alongside a dramatic doubling of their return on advertising spend (ROAS). Furthermore, the technology drives a 15% increase in the average value of each order placed.
These figures point to a powerful engine for e-commerce efficiency. By significantly boosting the monetary return from existing traffic and ad budgets, Spangle addresses core pain points for online brands. The strong quantitative validation explains the investor enthusiasm fueling Spangle’s $100 million valuation. Kuruvilla’s post-Bolt initiative is positioning itself as a key tool for brands aiming to maximize profitability in a competitive digital market.
Proven Impact: A Case Study with Revolve
The tangible benefits of Spangle’s approach are already evident in its early partnerships. Ryan Pabelona, Vice President of Performance Marketing at leading fashion retailer Revolve, provided concrete metrics on the platform’s impact. Since implementing Spangle’s software to adapt shopping experiences in real-time, Revolve has witnessed a dramatic improvement in key performance indicators. Pabelona reported an approximately 60% improvement in return on ad spend (ROAS) and a 50% increase in revenue per visitor.
These figures validate Kuruvilla’s core thesis. By leveraging a constantly learning AI model tailored to Revolve’s inventory and customer data, Spangle can optimize the path to purchase moment-by-moment. This could mean highlighting different product categories based on trending searches, personalizing homepage banners for traffic sources, or adjusting on-site search algorithms to align with emerging shopping intent—all without manual intervention from Revolve’s marketing team.
Foundational Experience: Building on Amazon and Bolt
Kuruvilla’s vision for Spangle is deeply informed by his frontline experience in scaling two commerce giants. His more than ten years at Amazon were spent working on massive-scale commerce and AI systems, giving him an intimate understanding of the infrastructure required to handle immense traffic and complex data. He then applied this expertise as CEO of Bolt, where he led the company’s mission to streamline the checkout process across the web.
This unique background—spanning the breadth of Amazon’s ecosystem and the pinpoint focus of one-click checkout—shaped Spangle’s foundational philosophy. “Our experience running commerce and payments platforms shaped our focus on building infrastructure rather than incremental fixes,” Kuruvilla noted. He observed that many existing solutions offer Band-Aids for specific problems, like a new chatbot widget or a standalone personalization engine. Spangle, in contrast, aims to be the underlying operating system.
This ambition has led some in the industry to view the startup as a “Shopify for AI-powered commerce.” Just as Shopify provided the foundational platform for merchants to easily build and manage online stores in the Web 2.0 era, Kuruvilla envisions Spangle providing the core AI infrastructure that allows brands to thrive in the emerging AI-first shopping era.
The Convergence That Made It Possible
Kuruvilla is adamant that a venture like Spangle could only become viable very recently. He points to a critical convergence of three major shifts over the past two years.
First, consumer behavior has fundamentally changed. Shoppers are growing increasingly comfortable using AI tools like ChatGPT for product discovery and recommendations, moving beyond simple keyword searches to conversational commerce.
Second, the digital marketing landscape has fragmented. While Google and Meta remain dominant, the proliferation of new channels—from TikTok Shop to emerging AI agent platforms—has made it exponentially harder for brands to maintain a consistent, optimized presence everywhere.
Third, and perhaps most crucially, advances in AI technology have dramatically lowered the cost and latency of generating high-quality, real-time content and experiences. The ability to dynamically create and serve tailored shopping experiences at scale is now economically and technically feasible.
“Together,” Kuruvilla said, “these changes made it possible to replace incremental fixes with an AI-native commerce system that can adapt instantly as shopping behavior evolves.” This trifecta created the perfect market conditions for Spangle’s infrastructure-first approach.
Lean Team, Enterprise Ambitions
In a telling sign of how AI is reshaping business operations, Spangle is achieving this with a remarkably lean team. The company currently has only six full-time employees, demonstrating how AI tools enable small, focused teams to build and scale complex enterprise software that would have required hundreds of engineers just a few years ago.
Kuruvilla founded the startup in 2024 alongside CTO Fei Wang, a former Amazon principal engineer whose credentials include work on the foundational technologies for Alexa and customer service systems, followed by a role as CTO at Saks Off 5th. This blend of deep AI expertise and direct retail executive experience forms the technical backbone of the company.
The Road Ahead: Scaling the Infrastructure
With the new capital from its latest funding round, Spangle is poised for rapid expansion. Kuruvilla outlined clear priorities for the investment: aggressive research and development to extend the platform’s AI capabilities, strategic growth of the engineering team to accelerate product development, and the build-out of a sales organization to bring its technology to a broader array of global retailers.
The journey from leading Bolt to tripling Spangle’s valuation in a short span underscores a broader narrative in the tech industry. The era of AI is not just about new features; it’s about rebuilding core infrastructure for a new paradigm. Maju Kuruvilla, with Spangle, is betting that the future of retail belongs to those who build the intelligent, adaptive, and foundational layer upon which all future shopping experiences—whether human or AI-driven—will depend. The $100 million valuation is a powerful signal that investors believe he may be right.
FAQ Section
Q1: What is Spangle, and who founded it?
A1: Spangle is an AI-native commerce infrastructure startup founded in 2024 by Maju Kuruvilla, former CEO of Bolt, and Fei Wang, former Amazon principal engineer and CTO of Saks Off 5th. It aims to be the foundational “operating system” for brands to dynamically adapt to both human shoppers and AI shopping agents.
Q2: Why did Spangle’s valuation jump to $100 million?
A2: The valuation tripled following a successful funding round, driven by strong investor confidence in its unique infrastructure-first approach. This approach addresses a critical market shift towards AI-driven shopping, proven by early results with clients like Revolve.
Q3: How does Spangle’s technology actually work?
A3: Spangle trains a dedicated AI model on each retailer’s specific product catalog and real-time performance data. This allows the entire on-site shopping experience—from search results and product discovery to page layouts and promotions—to adapt and optimize automatically, without manual intervention.
Q4: What real-world results has Spangle delivered?
A4: Early adopter Revolve reported significant metrics: an approximately 60% improvement in Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and a 50% increase in revenue per visitor after implementing Spangle’s software to adapt experiences in real-time.
Q5: How is Spangle different from other e-commerce or AI tools?
A5: Unlike point solutions that add chatbots or basic personalization, Spangle is built as core infrastructure. Founders Kuruvilla and Wang call it a “Shopify for AI-powered commerce.” It’s designed not for incremental fixes but to future-proof brands by creating a dynamic system that communicates effectively with both humans and AI agents.
Q6: What major shifts make Spangle viable now?
A6: According to Kuruvilla, three recent convergences created the perfect opportunity:
- Consumer Behavior: Shoppers are now comfortable using AI tools like ChatGPT for product discovery.
- Channel Fragmentation: New shopping channels beyond Google/Meta (like TikTok Shop, AI agents) have exploded.
- AI Advancement: The cost and latency of generating real-time, high-quality AI content have dropped dramatically, making dynamic, large-scale adaptation feasible.
Q7: How can Spangle operate with such a small team?
A7: Spangle currently has only six full-time employees, underscoring a key trend: modern AI tools allow small, elite teams to build and scale complex enterprise software that once required hundreds of engineers, dramatically changing startup economics.
Q8: What will Spangle do with its new funding?
A8: The fresh capital will be used to accelerate research and development, expand the core engineering team, and build out a sales organization to onboard more global retailers onto its platform.
