BrillianceAn 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 after the investment.
Led by Neurode Capital Partners, the all-equity Series A round comes a year after the Seattle-based startup raised a $6 million seed round at a $30 million pre-money valuation. According to the startup, Madrona, DNX Ventures, Streamlined Ventures and strategic angel investors also participated, bringing the total funding to $21 million.
Retailers are facing a change in the way consumers discover products online, as AI tools, social platforms and recommendation engines are increasingly influencing purchase decisions before shoppers even reach a brand’s website. Kuruvila (pictured above) aims to address this with Spangle – positioning it as software that helps retailers personalize shopping experiences based on the context as shoppers navigate their sites using real-time, AI-generated product recommendations and layouts.
Since emerging from stealth in March last year, Spangle has signed nine enterprise clients, including fashion retailers Revolve, Alexander Wang and Steve Madden, with combined online sales of about $3.8 billion, Kuruvilla said in an interview.
Traffic flowing through Spangle’s platform has increased nearly 57% month-over-month, all customers have increased use of the software, and the startup said it quadrupled its annual revenue in the fourth quarter, though it did not disclose revenue figures.
At the core of Spangle’s approach is a simple idea: Instead of sending buyers to pre-built product or category pages, brands route traffic to what is essentially a blank page. Spangle’s AI populates that page in real-time using a proprietary model called ProductGPT to surface products, recommendations, and content tailored to that moment based on signals such as where the shopper came from, what they searched for or clicked on, and how similar visitors have behaved.
Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that brands using Spangle are seeing a nearly 50% increase in revenue per visit, a doubling of return on ad spend, and a 15% increase in average order value.
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“We are future-proofing the brand,” Kuruvilla said, adding that Spangle trains its AI models on each retailer’s catalog and performance data, allowing shopping experiences to be automatically optimized.
Spangle’s software has helped Revolve optimize shopping experiences in real-time, improving return on ad spend by nearly 60% and increasing revenue per visit by 50%, said Ryan Pabellona, the retailer’s vice president of performance marketing.
Before starting Spangle in 2024, Kuruvilla served as CEO of one-click checkout company Bolt and before that spent more than a decade at Amazon, where he worked extensively on 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 technologies 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 improvements. Some see the startup as a kind of Shopify for AI-powered commerce, he said.
Spangle’s approach also aligns with the shift toward AI tools mediated purchasing, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and several browser-based agents. As consumers increasingly rely on chatbots and automated agents to discover and compare products, Kuruvilla said brands will need software that can respond dynamically to both human buyers and machines, rather than presenting the same static page to every visitor.
Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that Spangle has only become viable in the last two years because three key changes have come together: consumers becoming increasingly comfortable discovering products through AI tools, the rapid proliferation of search channels beyond Google and Meta, and advances in AI technology that have sharply reduced the cost and latency of generating real-time experiences. Together, he said, those changes make it possible to replace incremental improvements with an AI-native commerce system that can quickly adapt as shopping behavior evolves.
Currently, Spangle has six full-time employees, underscoring how AI tools are allowing startups to scale enterprise software with relatively small teams.
Kuruvilla said that with the fresh funding, Spangle plans to further invest in research and development, expand its engineering team and build out its sales organization.
