Former Bolt CEO's New Venture Skyrockets to $100 Million Valuation

Spangle, an AI-powered e-commerce startup founded by former Bolt CEO Maju Kuruvilla, has secured $15 million in a new funding round, bringing the company's post-investment valuation to $100 million.

Led by NewRoad Capital Partners, this all-equity Series A round follows a $6 million seed funding over a year ago, which valued the Seattle-based startup at $30 million pre-money. Madrona, DNX Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, and strategic angel investors also joined the round, raising Spangle's total funding to $21 million.

Retailers are navigating significant shifts in online product discovery, as AI tools, social platforms, and recommendation engines increasingly guide purchasing decisions before customers even reach a brand's site. Kuruvilla (pictured above) designed Spangle to tackle this challenge—positioning it as software that helps retailers personalize shopping journeys by leveraging real-time, AI-generated product recommendations and dynamic layouts as visitors browse their sites.

Since launching from stealth mode in March last year, Spangle has onboarded nine enterprise clients, including fashion retailers Revolve, Alexander Wang, and Steve Madden. Together, these brands generate approximately $3.8 billion in online sales, Kuruvilla shared in an interview.

Traffic processed through Spangle's platform has grown about 57% month-over-month, with all existing clients expanding their usage. The startup also reported quadrupling its annualized revenue in the fourth quarter, though specific revenue figures were not disclosed.

At the heart of Spangle's strategy lies a straightforward concept: Rather than directing shoppers to pre-built product or category pages, brands route visitors to what is essentially a blank canvas. Spangle's AI dynamically populates this page in real time using its proprietary ProductGPT model, drawing on signals such as the visitor's origin, search queries, click behavior, and patterns from similar users to display tailored products, recommendations, and content.

Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that brands using Spangle are observing nearly a 50% boost in revenue per visit, a 100% increase in return on ad spend, and a 15% rise in average order value.

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"We're future-proofing the brand," Kuruvilla explained, noting that Spangle trains its AI model on each retailer's product catalog and performance data, enabling shopping experiences to adapt automatically.

Ryan Pabelona, Revolve's vice president of performance marketing, confirmed that Spangle's software has enabled real-time adaptation of shopping experiences, resulting in roughly a 60% improvement in return on ad spend and a 50% increase in revenue per visit.

Before launching Spangle in 2024, Kuruvilla served as CEO of one-click checkout company Bolt and previously spent over a decade at Amazon, where he contributed to large-scale commerce and AI systems. He co-founded the startup 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.

Kuruvilla noted that their background in managing commerce and payments platforms influenced Spangle's emphasis on building foundational infrastructure rather than pursuing incremental improvements. Some industry observers, he added, see the startup as a Shopify-like platform for AI-driven commerce.

Spangle's approach aligns with the growing trend of AI-mediated shopping, fueled by tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and various browser-based agents. As consumers increasingly turn to chatbots and automated assistants to search and compare products, Kuruvilla emphasized that brands will require software capable of responding dynamically to both human shoppers and machines, moving beyond static, one-size-fits-all web pages.

Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that Spangle only became feasible in the last two years, thanks to three converging trends: growing consumer acceptance of discovering products via AI tools, the rapid expansion of discovery channels beyond Google and Meta, and AI advancements that significantly reduced the cost and latency of generating real-time experiences. These developments, he said, enabled the shift from incremental fixes to an AI-native commerce system that adapts instantly as shopping behaviors change.

Currently, Spangle operates with just six full-time employees, highlighting how AI technologies are enabling startups to scale enterprise software solutions with lean teams.

Kuruvilla stated that the new capital will support further research and development, expansion of the engineering team, and growth of the sales organization.