Ex-Spotify Employees Bring AI-Powered E-commerce Recommendations to the Masses

A team of ex-Spotify employees is on a mission to revolutionize the e-commerce industry with AI-powered recommendations, and they've just raised $10 million to make it happen.

AI-Powered E-commerce Recommendations

Sidd Motwani, Ian Anderson, and Shivaditya Sinha, the founders of Malachyte, spent years building the behavioral intelligence infrastructure behind Spotify's recommendation engine, known as Vector AI. This system predicts a person's intent and next actions instead of relying solely on their past behavior, powering about 90% of Spotify's recommendations to its 800 million users.

Now, they're bringing a similar system to e-commerce with Malachyte, which aims to change the way online stores treat shoppers. Most online stores treat shoppers the same way, with personalization largely dictated by historical purchases, demographic segmentation, or logged-in customer profiles. This means first-time visitors often see the same generic storefront as everyone else, while existing shoppers receive recommendations based primarily on what they bought previously rather than what they need today.

Malachyte wants to change that by building real-time, intent-aware shopping experiences. Its platform uses what it calls "two-headed Vector AI" to predict what product a shopper wants next, learn their general taste, and fine-tune continuously based on what they do in real time.

“[Our] system starts forming before the first click, using the context available the moment the page loads. Within a single session, we build a real read on both preferences and what someone is trying to accomplish right now,” Motwani, Malachyte's CEO, told TechCrunch.

A Search for 'Heavy-Duty Boot' Can Already Predict User Intent

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, with no account or history required. Every additional action sharpens the profile, so the experience gets more relevant the longer someone stays, and again on their next visit.

Motwani argues that retailers already possess their most valuable source of customer intelligence, but rarely take advantage of it in real time. He believes that contextual signals remain significantly underutilized, and that most systems either never act on them in the moment or aggregate them into a segment overnight.

Real-Time Personalization

Malachyte's platform has been developing and testing its technology since 2024, and worked with more than 20 enterprise customers across travel, grocery, and retail before ultimately focusing on e-commerce. Its platform first went live in the fall of 2025 with Fun.com, and has been generally available to Shopify merchants through a native integration since June 2026.

Looking ahead, Motwani says the bigger opportunity is in bringing merchandising and marketing together around the same understanding of customer behavior.

Funding and Future Plans

The funding round was co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Gradient, with participation from Harpoon Ventures. Malachyte plans to use the funds to scale distribution and hire more product and commercial leaders.

When asked about the future plans, Motwani said, “The bigger opportunity is in bringing merchandising and marketing together around the same understanding of customer behavior.”