Former Bolt CEO’s AI Startup Spangle Reaches $100M Valuation

Spangle, an AI-driven e-commerce startup founded by former Bolt CEO Maju Kuruvilla, has raised $15 million in a new funding round, bringing its post-money valuation to $100 million, the company said.

NewRoad Capital Partners led the all-equity Series A round and follows a $6 million seed round raised more than a year ago at a $30 million pre-money valuation. Additional participants included Madrona, DNX Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, and several strategic angel investors. With the new raise, Spangle’s total funding now stands at $21 million.

Retailers are navigating major shifts in how consumers discover products online, as AI tools, social platforms, and recommendation engines increasingly influence purchase decisions before shoppers reach a brand’s website. Kuruvilla founded Spangle to address that change, positioning the company as software that helps retailers dynamically personalise shopping experiences for visitors as they move through their sites.

Spangle’s platform uses real-time, AI-generated product recommendations and layouts to tailor each visit based on context. Since emerging from stealth in March 2025, the Seattle-based startup has signed nine enterprise customers, including fashion brands Revolve, Alexander Wang, and Steve Madden, which together generate roughly $3.8 billion in annual online sales, Kuruvilla said.

Traffic through Spangle’s system has grown by about 57% month over month, with every customer increasing their platform usage. The company also said it quadrupled its annualised revenue in the fourth quarter, though it did not disclose specific revenue figures.

At the centre of Spangle’s approach is a shift away from static product or category pages. Instead, brands direct shoppers to what is effectively a blank page, which Spangle’s AI fills in real time. Using its proprietary ProductGPT model, the platform analyses signals such as referral sources, search behaviour, clicks, and patterns among similar users to generate personalised product assortments, recommendations, and content on the fly.

Image Credits: Spangle

Kuruvilla said retailers using Spangle are seeing nearly a 50% increase in revenue per visit, roughly double the return on ad spend, and a 15% lift in average order value.

“We’re future-proofing the brand,” Kuruvilla said, explaining that Spangle trains its AI on each retailer’s catalogue and performance data so shopping experiences can adapt automatically as conditions change.

Spangle’s impact on Revolve has been powerful, according to Ryan Pabelona, the retailer’s vice president of performance marketing, who said the software has driven a 60% improvement in return on ad spend and a 50% increase in revenue per visit by adjusting experiences in real time.

Before founding Spangle in 2024, Kuruvilla served as CEO of Bolt and previously spent more than a decade at Amazon, where he worked on large-scale commerce and AI systems. He co-founded Spangle with 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.

Their backgrounds in commerce infrastructure and payments influenced Spangle’s focus on rebuilding core systems rather than applying incremental fixes. Some observers, Kuruvilla said, describe Spangle as a kind of Shopify for AI-native commerce.

The company’s strategy aligns with a broader shift toward AI-mediated shopping, as tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and browser-based agents increasingly help consumers search for and compare products. As that trend accelerates, Kuruvilla said brands will need systems that can respond dynamically to both human shoppers and automated agents, rather than serving identical static pages to every visitor.

Kuruvilla added that Spangle became viable only in the past two years, as three trends converged: consumers becoming comfortable discovering products through AI, the rapid expansion of discovery channels beyond Google and Meta, and advances in AI that significantly reduced the cost and latency of generating real-time experiences.

Spangle currently employs six full-time staff, underscoring how AI tools enable small teams to build and scale enterprise software. With the new funding, the company plans to further invest in research and development, expand its engineering team, and grow its sales organisation.