Three former Spotify employees are taking lessons from recommendation technology into online shopping. Sidd Motwani, Ian Anderson and Shivaditya Sinha built behavioral intelligence infrastructure behind Spotify recommendations, and their new startup Malachyte is now applying a similar idea to e-commerce.
The company said on Thursday that it raised $10 million in seed funding. The goal is to scale distribution and hire more product and commercial leaders as Malachyte pushes its real-time personalization platform further into online retail.
From Spotify recommendations to online stores
Motwani, Anderson and Sinha spent years working on the behavioral intelligence system behind Spotify's recommendation engine. That system, called Vector AI, is designed to predict a person's intent and next actions instead of depending only on past behavior.
According to the source article, Vector AI powers about 90% of Spotify's recommendations to its 800 million users. Malachyte is built around the view that a related approach can improve how retailers decide what shoppers should see while browsing.
The company is not simply trying to show products based on what a customer bought before. Its pitch is that e-commerce needs to understand what a shopper appears to want during the current visit, then adjust the storefront as the session unfolds.
What Malachyte says is broken in e-commerce personalization
Malachyte was formed around a specific critique of online stores: many treat shoppers in broad, static ways. Personalization is often tied to historical purchases, demographic segmentation, or logged-in customer profiles.
That creates two gaps. First-time visitors may get a generic storefront because the retailer does not yet know who they are. Returning shoppers may receive suggestions that reflect older purchases more than present intent.
For Malachyte, the missed opportunity is the stream of behavior that happens during a shopping session. A visitor's search terms, clicks, hovers, scrolls, refinements and add-to-cart actions can all reveal what they are trying to accomplish right now.
The startup argues that many systems either fail to act on those signals immediately or process them later as part of a broader segment. Malachyte's approach is to interpret those signals continuously so the shopping experience can change while the customer is still on the site.
How the intent-aware system works
Malachyte describes its platform as using a two-headed Vector AI system. The first part is meant to predict what product a shopper may want next. The second is meant to learn broader taste while the system keeps tuning itself based on real-time behavior.
Motwani told TechCrunch that the system begins forming a profile before the first click, using context available when the page loads. During a single session, it builds an understanding of both preferences and what the shopper is trying to do at that moment.
The source article gives a practical example: if someone searches for heavy-duty boot and then clicks on steel-toed boots twice, the system can move work pants and gloves higher while pushing dress shoes lower. That can happen without an account or purchase history.
Each additional action is meant to make the experience more relevant. The same learning can also carry into the shopper's next visit, according to Motwani.
Context matters as much as clicks
Malachyte is also emphasizing contextual signals. Motwani told TechCrunch that a phone visitor at 11 p.m. from an email link may be in a different state of mind than the same person using a laptop mid-morning, yet many systems treat those sessions the same way.
That distinction matters because e-commerce recommendations are not only about who a person is. They are also about timing, device, entry point and the goal of a specific shopping session.
In plain terms, Malachyte is trying to make the storefront less fixed. Instead of waiting for a full profile or using overnight segmentation, the company wants product ranking, merchandising and recommendations to respond as the customer reveals intent.
Funding, availability and the next opportunity
Malachyte has been developing and testing its technology since 2024. Before narrowing its focus to e-commerce, it worked with more than 20 enterprise customers across travel, grocery and retail.
The platform first went live in the fall of 2025 with Fun.com. Since June 2026, it has been generally available to Shopify merchants through a native integration. Larger retailers can connect through its API.
The $10 million seed round was co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Gradient, with participation from Harpoon Ventures. The company plans to use the funding to expand distribution and hire more leaders across product and commercial roles.
Motwani sees a broader opportunity beyond product recommendations alone. Looking ahead, he says the bigger goal is to bring merchandising and marketing together around the same understanding of customer behavior.
That is the central bet behind Malachyte: if retailers can interpret shopper intent in the moment, they can make the entire online store feel more responsive, from product discovery to merchandising decisions.