Loops Smart AI Lands $3.5M to Unify Fragmented E-Commerce AI Tools

Loops Smart AI, an agentic e-commerce platform, has secured $3.5 million in seed funding to address the fragmentation plaguing online retailers' use of artificial intelligence. Leading the round was Andreessen Horowitz's a16z speedrun accelerator, joined by investors including NTT Docomo, Connecticut Innovations, Alumni Ventures and Monday Capital.

The startup's core insight stems from a problem co-founder and Chief Executive Ari Nazir identified in how most retailers deploy AI. Rather than adopting a cohesive strategy, retailers typically layer on individual AI capabilities one at a time—a search tool here, a chatbot there, product description generation elsewhere, virtual try-ons somewhere else. According to Nazir, this piecemeal approach creates silos where each tool operates independently, understanding only fragments of the customer journey instead of the complete picture. The result is a disjointed experience that fails to guide shoppers toward the products they actually want.

The inspiration for Loops came from a personal experience. Co-founder İlker Selim Zorluoğlu was attempting to buy a gift for his two-year-old daughter while on vacation in Bali and needed to ask questions about the product. Despite reaching out to the retailer across multiple channels, he received no response and abandoned the purchase. Nazir and Zorluoğlu investigated why such a straightforward transaction proved so difficult and uncovered a deeper issue: retailers lacked the foundational infrastructure to operate in an AI-driven environment.

We started investigating why something so simple was still so difficult. What we found was a much bigger problem than unanswered messages: Retailers lacked the infrastructure to operate in an AI-driven world. Consumers were becoming comfortable with asking AI questions in natural language, but online shopping still depended on dropdown menus, keyword searches and disconnected customer-service queues.

Ari Nazir, Loops co-founder and CEO

A unified layer for the entire journey

Loops' solution centers on a single, unified AI layer that comprehends a retailer's full product catalog, absorbs its business context and follows each customer's intent from initial discovery through final purchase.

The platform comprises five core components. An AI search and product discovery tool enables customers to find products using natural language rather than traditional keyword searches. A shopping assistant provides real-time answers to customer questions. A product enrichment tool cleans and standardizes retailer catalog data so it's intelligible to both humans and AI systems. A virtual try-on capability lets shoppers visualize how products will appear on them. Together, these components allow Loops to track the shopper's complete journey across the platform, delivering immediate answers to questions as customers browse product suggestions, all informed by enriched catalog data.

Our approach brings these capabilities together into a holistic solution built around each business's products, knowledge and customer journey. Better product information supports better search; better discovery supports more useful shopping conversations; and those interactions reveal opportunities to improve the experience further.

Ari Nazir

Early traction with major retailers

Loops reports that over 70 online retailers have already deployed its platform, collectively enhancing millions of customer interactions. The Turkish supermarket chain A101 achieved an 83% increase in customer conversion rate after implementing Loops' AI tools. Coffee retailer Tchibo saw average order values climb by 13.6%. Fashion retailer Mavi restructured its entire shopping experience to let customers describe what they want—whether by occasion, style or fit—to an AI concierge rather than navigating keyword searches or category lists.

Nazir emphasized that Loops aims to sell retailers a complete business capability they can rely on rather than forcing them to assemble and maintain fragmented solutions independently.

Expansion beyond commerce

The fresh capital will support Loops' global expansion. Looking further ahead, the company envisions applying its connected-journey model to industries beyond e-commerce, including financial services and energy, where it could streamline similarly disconnected workflows.

Commerce is our starting point. But the larger ambition is to help companies become AI native: where AI becomes part of how work gets done, rather than an isolated feature added to existing software.

Ari Nazir

Fareed Mosavat, representing a16z Speedrun, highlighted what drew the firm to Loops: the company's ambitious vision combined with its demonstrated ability to function reliably within actual business environments. He noted that commerce represents an ideal proving ground because the connection between improved AI experiences and measurable business value is particularly evident. Loops' pilot conversion rates and early customer expansion demonstrate that brands are seeking a platform capable of owning a larger portion of the customer journey.