Ex-Spotify employees raise $10M to bring intent-aware AI to e-commerce
Former Spotify employees raised $10M for Malachyte, bringing their recommendation AI to e-commerce with real-time intent-aware shopping.
Sidd Motwani, Ian Anderson, and Shivaditya Sinha were behind Vector AI, the system Spotify uses to predict a person's intent and next actions rather than relying only on past behavior. It powers about 90% of recommendations for Spotify's 800 million users.
Malachyte's platform applies a version of that system to online retail. It uses what the company calls a "two-headed Vector AI" to predict which product a shopper is likely to want next, learn their general taste, and adjust continuously based on their in-session activity. The approach is meant to address what the founders see as a common weakness in online stores: personalization driven mostly by purchase history, demographic segments, or logged-in profiles, leaving first-time visitors with generic storefronts and returning shoppers with suggestions based on what they bought before.
"Our system starts forming before the first click, using the context available the moment the page loads," Motwani, Malachyte's chief executive, told TechCrunch. "Within a single session, we build a real read on both preferences and what someone is trying to accomplish right now." He said a search for "heavy-duty boot" followed by two clicks on steel-toed boots is enough to move work pants and gloves up the page and push dress shoes down, without requiring an account or past history.
Motwani said retailers have the data needed for this kind of personalization but rarely use it in real time. "Every hover, click, scroll, search refinement, and add-to-cart is a signal," he said. He also said contextual signals are underused, adding that a phone visitor at 11 p.m. arriving from an email link is in a different state of mind than the same person on a laptop mid-morning.
The company has been developing and testing the technology since 2024 and worked with more than 20 enterprise customers across travel, grocery, and retail before focusing on e-commerce. Its platform went live in fall 2025 with Fun.com, and since June 2026 it has been generally available to Shopify merchants through a native integration. Larger retailers can integrate the technology through an API.
Motwani said the bigger opportunity ahead is bringing merchandising and marketing together around the same understanding of customer behavior.