E-commerce AI startup Loops raises $3.5M to create smoother online shopping experiences

Loops has raised $3.5 million in seed funding to push a more connected version of online shopping. Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z speedrun led the round, with NTT Docomo, Connecticut Innovations, Alumni Ventures and Monday Capital also taking part.

The startup’s pitch is pretty simple: most retailers have added AI one tool at a time, and that leaves customers bouncing between disconnected systems. A search box here, a chatbot there, a product-description generator somewhere else. Useful pieces, sure. But Loops says they do not understand the full shopping journey when they live in silos.

That frustration is what co-founder and CEO Ari Nazir says led him and co-founder İlker Selim Zorluoğlu to the company’s current idea. While in Bali a couple of years ago, Zorluoğlu tried to buy a gift online for his two-year-old daughter, messaged the retailer several times with questions, and never got a response. He skipped the purchase. Nazir says the real problem was not just bad customer service. Retailers, in his view, did not have the infrastructure for a world where shoppers are comfortable asking questions in natural language.

Loops is built as a single AI layer that understands a retailer’s full catalog, takes in business context and follows a shopper from discovery to purchase. The platform includes AI search and product discovery, a real-time shopping assistant, product enrichment for cleaning up catalog data, and virtual try-on. In practice, Loops says shoppers can ask for what they want in plain language, get answers while browsing, and move through a more continuous experience.

The company says more than 70 online retailers are already using its platform, with millions of customer journeys touched so far. It points to A101, a Turkish supermarket chain, which saw a conversion-rate increase of 83% after adopting Loops’ tools. Tchibo saw a 13.6% lift in average order values, and Mavi has shifted to an AI concierge where customers describe an occasion, a style or a fit instead of typing keywords.

The new money will help Loops scale globally, but the company’s ambitions go beyond retail. It wants to move into financial services and energy, and eventually help companies become “AI native,” where AI is part of the work rather than a feature bolted on afterward.