Former Bolt CEO Maju Kuruvillas startup triples to $100M valuation | TechCrunch

Spangle, an 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 NewRoad Capital Partners, the all-equity Series A round comes over a year after the Seattle-based startup raised a $6 million seed round at a $30 million pre-money valuation. Madrona, DNX Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, and strategic angel investors also participated, bringing total funding to $21 million, according to the startup.

Retailers are facing changes in how consumers discover products online, as AI tools, social platforms, and recommendation engines increasingly influence buying decisions before shoppers reach a brand’s website. Kuruvilla (pictured above) aims to address this with Spangle — positioning it as software that helps retailers personalize shopping experiences based on that context as shoppers move through their sites, using real-time, AI-generated product recommendations and layouts.

Since emerging from stealth in March of last year, Spangle has signed nine enterprise 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 about 57% month-on-month, with all customers expanding their use of the software, and the startup said it quadrupled its annualized 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 shoppers to pre-built product or category pages, brands route traffic to what is essentially a blank page. Spangle’s AI fills that page in real time using a proprietary model called ProductGPT, drawing on signals such as where the shopper came from, what they searched for or clicked on, and how similar visitors have behaved, to surface products, recommendations, and content tailored to that moment.

Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that brands using Spangle are seeing close to a 50% increase in revenue per visit, a doubling of return on ad spend, and a 15% increase in average order value.

“We are future-proofing the brand,” Kuruvilla said, adding that Spangle trains its AI model on each retailer’s catalog and performance data, allowing shopping experiences to adapt automatically.

Spangle’s software has helped Revolve adapt shopping experiences in real time, driving about a 60% improvement in return on 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 the one-click checkout company Bolt and earlier spent more than a decade at Amazon, where he worked on large-scale commerce and AI systems. He founded the startup alongside CTO Fei Wang, a former Amazon principal engineer who worked on Alexa and customer service technologies and later served as CTO at Saks Off 5th.

Kuruvilla said their experience running commerce and payments platforms shaped Spangle’s focus on building infrastructure rather than incremental fixes. Some, he added, view the startup as a kind of Shopify for AI-powered commerce.

Spangle’s approach also aligns with a shift toward shopping mediated by AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and several browser-based agents. As consumers increasingly rely on chatbots and automated agents to search for and compare products, Kuruvilla said brands will need software that can respond dynamically to both human shoppers and machines, rather than serving the same static pages to every visitor.

Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that Spangle became viable only in the past two years as three major shifts converged: consumers growing comfortable discovering products through AI tools, a rapid proliferation of discovery channels beyond Google and Meta, and advances in AI technology that have sharply lowered the cost and latency of generating real-time experiences. Together, he said, those changes made it possible to replace incremental fixes with an AI-native commerce system that can adapt instantly 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.

With the fresh funding, Kuruvilla said Spangle plans to invest further in research and development, expand its engineering team, and build out its sales organization.