Former Bolt CEO’s AI Startup Spangle Triples to $100M

Seattle-based AI e-commerce startup Spangle, founded by former Bolt CEO Maju Kuruvilla, secured a $15 million Series A funding round today to scale its real-time personalization software, tripling its valuation to $100 million.

An All-Equity Series A to Fuel Enterprise Growth

The newly announced all-equity round was led by NewRoad Capital Partners. This major financial milestone comes just over a year after the startup raised a $6 million seed round at a $30 million pre-money valuation. Key venture players, including Madrona, DNX Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, and several strategic angel investors, also joined the round, bringing Spangle’s total capital raised to date to $21 million.

Solving the Modern E-Commerce Discovery Challenge

Online retail is undergoing a massive shift. Modern consumers increasingly rely on social media platforms, AI search tools, and advanced recommendation engines to discover products long before they ever visit a brand’s website. Spangle addresses this change directly. The platform acts as dynamic software that helps retailers tailor and personalize the on-site shopping experience in real time, adapting to the shopper’s context through instant, AI-generated layouts and product suggestions.

How ProductGPT Replaces Static Category Pages

At the center of Spangle’s technology is a departure from traditional web design. Instead of directing incoming traffic to static, pre-built product or category pages, online stores route users to an empty canvas. Spangle’s proprietary AI model, ProductGPT, populates this page instantly. By analyzing real-time signals—such as the visitor’s referral source, search history, clicks, and the behavior of similar shoppers—the system displays a highly customized selection of products and content tailored to that exact moment.

Strong Market Traction and Proven ROI

Since launching from stealth in March of last year, Spangle has secured nine major enterprise clients, including prominent fashion brands Alexander Wang, Steve Madden, and Revolve. Together, these retailers generate approximately $3.8 billion in digital sales. Performance metrics indicate that traffic running through the platform is expanding by roughly 57% month-over-month, and the startup quadrupled its annualized revenue during the fourth quarter.

Retailers utilizing the software are reporting significant financial gains. According to Kuruvilla, partner brands have experienced nearly a 50% increase in revenue per visit, a 15% rise in average order value, and a doubling of their return on ad spend (ROAS). For instance, Ryan Pabelona, Vice President of Performance Marketing at Revolve, confirmed that Spangle’s real-time adaptability drove a 60% boost in ROAS and a 50% surge in revenue per visit.

By training the AI model directly on each merchant’s product catalog and historical performance data, the software allows digital storefronts to adjust automatically and remain future-proof against changing consumer habits.

Built by E-Commerce and Cloud Veterans

The leadership team brings extensive industry experience to the venture. Before founding Spangle in 2024, Kuruvilla led the checkout technology company Bolt as CEO and spent more than a decade at Amazon developing complex commerce and AI systems. He co-founded the startup alongside CTO Fei Wang, a former Amazon principal engineer who worked on Alexa and customer service systems before serving as the CTO of Saks Off 5th.

Their background in managing high-volume payment and retail platforms led them to focus on foundational infrastructure rather than minor web optimizations, with some industry observers comparing the startup’s potential to a “Shopify for AI-native commerce.”

The Convergence of AI and Consumer Behavior

This infrastructure-first approach aligns with the growing trend of AI-mediated shopping, where tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and various automated browser agents search and compare products on behalf of consumers. As automated tools play a larger role in product discovery, brands require back-end software capable of responding dynamically to both human visitors and machine agents, rather than relying on uniform, static websites.

Three primary shifts over the past two years made this technology viable: widespread consumer comfort with AI-driven discovery, a fragmented digital ad landscape shifting beyond Google and Meta, and rapid advancements in AI that lowered the latency and cost of generating real-time web experiences. These factors allowed the company to bypass superficial fixes and build an adaptable, AI-native commerce system.

Future Roadmap

Spangle currently operates with a lean team of six full-time employees, illustrating how advanced AI tools allow software startups to scale efficiently. With the newly acquired $15 million in funding, the company plans to accelerate its research and development, grow its engineering team, and build out a dedicated sales division.