Decoratean AI e-commerce startup founded by former Bolt CEO Maju Kuruvilla has raised $15 million in a new round of funding, valuing the company at $100 million post-investment.
Led by NewRoad Capital Partners, the all-equity Series A round comes more than 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 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 media platforms and recommendation engines increasingly influence purchase decisions before shoppers even 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 this context as shoppers navigate their sites, using real-time AI-generated product recommendations and layouts.
Since emerging from stealth in March of last year, Spangle has signed on nine corporate clients, including fashion retailers Revolve, Alexander Wang and Steve Madden, whose combined online sales are about $3.8 billion, Kuruvilla said in an interview.
Traffic flowing through Spangle’s platform has grown about 57% month-over-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.
At the core of Spangle’s approach is a simple idea: Instead of sending shoppers to pre-built product or category pages, brands direct traffic to what is essentially a blank page. Spangle’s AI populates this page in real-time using a proprietary model called ProductGPT, based on signals like where the shopper came from, what they searched for or clicked on, and how similar visitors behaved, to show products, recommendations, and content tailored to that moment.
Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that brands using Spangle are seeing a nearly 50% increase in revenue per visit, a doubling of return on ad spend, and a 15% increase in average order value.
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“We’re 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 customize shopping experiences in real time, improving about 60% 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 was CEO of one-click checkout company Bolt and earlier spent over a decade at Amazon, where he worked on large-scale commerce and artificial intelligence 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 said their experience managing commerce and payment platforms shaped Spangle’s focus on building infrastructure rather than incremental fixes. Some, he added, see the startup as a kind of Shopify for AI-powered commerce.
Spangle’s approach also aligns with a shift toward AI-mediated markets like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and several browser-based agents. As consumers increasingly rely on chatbots and automated agents to search and compare products, Kuruvilla said brands will need software that can respond dynamically to both humans 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 big changes converged: consumers conveniently discovering products through AI tools, a rapid proliferation of discovery channels beyond Google and Meta, and advances in AI technology that significantly reduced the cost and latency of creating real-time experiences. Together, he said, these changes have made it possible to replace incremental fixes with a native AI trading system that can adapt instantly as buying behavior evolves.
Spangle currently has six full-time employees, highlighting how AI tools enable startups to scale enterprise software with relatively small teams.
With the new funding, Kuruvilla said Spangle plans to further invest in research and development, expand its engineering team and build out its sales organization.
