Loops Smart AI raises $3.5M seed to unify e-commerce AI shopping tools

The company argues that retailers are adopting AI in a fragmented way by adding one feature at a time, resulting in disconnected experiences. Loops co-founder and Chief Executive Ari Nazir said a retailer might add one AI tool for product searches, a separate chatbot for customer questions, another for product descriptions and another for virtual try-ons. Those tools are useful individually, he said, but they run in silos and understand only a small piece of the overall customer journey, forcing retailers to stitch them together if they want to surface the ideal product for each shopper.

Nazir said he and co-founder İlker Selim Zorluoğlu experienced that disconnect themselves while on vacation in Bali a couple of years ago. Zorluoğlu was trying to buy a gift online for his two-year-old daughter and needed to ask a few questions about the product, Nazir said. He messaged the retailer several times across different channels but never received a reply, and ultimately decided against buying the product. Nazir said they began investigating why something so simple was still so difficult and found a larger problem: retailers lacked the infrastructure to operate in an AI-driven world. Consumers were becoming comfortable asking AI questions in natural language, he said, while online shopping still depended on dropdown menus, keyword searches and disconnected customer-service queues.

Loops’ answer is a single, unified AI layer that can understand a retailer’s entire product catalog, ingest its business context and follow each shopper’s intent from initial discovery through to purchase. The company says its platform relies on five core components, including AI search and product discovery for natural-language searches, a shopping assistant that answers questions in real time, a product enrichment tool that cleans and standardizes catalog data so it is readable by both humans and AI, and a virtual try-on tool that lets shoppers visualize products.

By offering these capabilities within one system, Loops says it can track the shopper’s journey from the moment they land on a retailer’s platform. Shoppers can describe what they are looking for, and if they have questions while browsing product suggestions, the system provides answers immediately using enriched catalog data. “Our approach brings these capabilities together into a holistic solution built around each business’s products, knowledge and customer journey,” Nazir said. “Better product information supports better search; better discovery supports more useful shopping conversations; and those interactions reveal opportunities to improve the experience further.”

Loops says it has already changed the shopping experience for more than 70 online retailers, which have deployed its platform to enhance millions of customer journeys. Turkish supermarket chain A101 increased its customer conversion rate by 83% after integrating Loops’ AI tools, according to the company. Coffee retailer Tchibo saw 13.6% higher average order values. Fashion retailer Mavi has reworked its shopping experience so consumers can tell an AI concierge what they want by describing an occasion, a style or a type of fit instead of entering keywords or searching through category lists. “We want our customers to buy a business capability that they can depend on, rather than assemble and maintain that capability by themselves,” Nazir said.

The funds from the seed round will help Loops scale its platform globally. In the longer term, the company believes connected customer journeys can also be beneficial in other industries beyond e-commerce.

Editor's Summary

Loops Smart AI has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by a16z speedrun to expand a unified AI layer for online retailers. The startup says its platform combines search, shopping assistance, product data enrichment and virtual try-on to connect shopper journeys, and it reports customers including A101, Tchibo and Mavi have seen conversion or order-value gains. The funding is intended to support global expansion.