Malachyte, an e-commerce personalization startup founded by former Spotify engineers Sidd Motwani, Ian Anderson, and Shivaditya Sinha, announced a $10 million seed funding round co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Gradient, with participation from Harpoon Ventures. The funding will support expanded distribution and additional hires across product and commercial teams.
The founders previously built behavioral intelligence infrastructure powering roughly 90% of Spotify’s recommendations for its 800 million users. With Malachyte, they aim to bring similar real-time, intent-based personalization to online retail, arguing that most e-commerce platforms rely too heavily on historical purchase data or demographic segmentation rather than real-time shopper behavior.
CEO Motwani said the company’s technology, called Vector AI, begins analyzing shopper intent from the moment a page loads, using signals such as clicks, searches, and product views to continuously refine recommendations within a single browsing session, without requiring account history. He said the system also accounts for contextual factors like time of day and device type, which he believes remain underutilized by most retail platforms.
Malachyte has been developing its technology since 2024, working with more than 20 enterprise customers across travel, grocery, and retail before narrowing its focus to e-commerce. The platform launched with retailer Fun.com in late 2025 and became generally available to Shopify merchants in June 2026, with larger retailers able to integrate through its API.
Featured image: Credit: Malachyte
