Former Bolt CEO Maju Kuruvilla’s startup value triples to $100 million

Spangle, an AI-powered 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.

The all-equity round, led by NewRoad Capital Partners, comes more than a year after the Seattle-based startup raised a $6 million seed round at a pre-fund valuation of $30 million. Madrona, DNX Ventures, Streamlined Ventures and strategic angel investors also participated, bringing the total funding to $21 million, according to the startup.

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

Since emerging from stealth in March last year, Spangle has taken on nine enterprise clients, including fashion retailers Revolve, Alexander Wang and Steve Madden, who have online sales totaling about $3.8 billion, Kuruvilla said in an interview.

Spangle’s streaming traffic grew nearly 57% month-on-month, with all customers expanding their use of the software, and the startup said it quadrupled its annual revenue in the fourth quarter, though it did not disclose revenue figures.

A simple idea lies at the core of Spangle’s approach: Instead of sending shoppers to pre-made product pages or categories, brands direct traffic to what is essentially a blank page. Spangle’s AI populates that page in real-time using a proprietary model called ProductGPT, relying on signals like where a shopper came from, what they searched for or clicked on, and how similar visitors behave, to surface products, recommendations, and content tailored to that moment.

Brands using Spangle see a nearly 50% increase in revenue per visit, double their return on ad spend, and a 15% increase in average order value, Kuruvilla told TechCrunch.

“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 helped Revolve adapt shopping experiences in real-time, resulting in a nearly 60% improvement in return on ad spend and a 50% increase in revenue per visit, said Ryan Babilona, ​​vice president of performance marketing at the retailer.

Before starting Spangle in 2024, Kuruvilla served as CEO of one-click payment company Bolt, and previously 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 lead engineer at Amazon who worked on Alexa and customer service technologies and later served as CTO at Saks Off 5th.

Their experience managing commerce and payments platforms shaped Spangle’s focus on building infrastructure rather than incremental fixes, Kuruvilla said. He added that some view the startup as a kind of Shopify for AI-powered commerce.

Spangle’s approach is also in line with the shift toward shopping mediated by AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and various browser-based agents. As consumers increasingly rely on chatbots and automated agents to research and compare products, Kuruvilla said brands will need software that can respond dynamically to both human and machine shoppers, rather than presenting the same static pages to each visitor.

Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that Spangle only became viable in the past two years as three major shifts converged: consumers’ increasing convenience in discovering products through AI tools, the rapid proliferation of discovery channels beyond Google and Meta, and advances in AI technology that have sharply reduced the cost and latency of generating real-time experiences. Taken together, he said, these changes made it possible to replace incremental fixes with a native AI-based trading system that can instantly adapt to evolving shopping behavior.

Currently, Spangle has six full-time employees, underscoring how AI tools allow startups to scale enterprise software with relatively small teams.

With the new funding, Kuruvilla said Spangle plans to invest further in R&D, expand its engineering team, and build its sales organization.