Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and Gradient, Spotify’s Recommendation Tech Comes for E-commerce
NEW YORK, Aug. 6, 2026 — Malachyte, a behavior intelligence company, today announced the close of a $10 million seed funding round co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Gradient Ventures with participation from Harpoon Ventures. Malachyte was co-founded by Sidd Motwani (CEO), Ian Anderson (CTO), and Shivaditya Sinha (COO), the team behind the behavioral intelligence infrastructure that powers 90%+ of Spotify’s recommendations across 800M+ users and 1B+ items. Now, they’re bringing that same technology to every retailer and e-commerce brand.
The raise comes as consumer e-commerce faces a conversion problem. Advances in ML-driven ad targeting on Google, Meta, and TikTok have made audience acquisition more precise than ever, yet the website experience most shoppers meet remains static. Today’s digital personalization stack can’t read the context a shopper arrives with, can’t adapt in real time as they browse, and can’t recognize a first-time visitor at all, leaving most shoppers with a generic online storefront.
Meanwhile, customer acquisition costs have risen roughly 40% between 2023 and 2025 (LoyaltyLion), and the average e-commerce brand now loses $29 per new customer after marketing and returns (SimplicityDX). Every unconverted visit compounds that loss.
“Brands are paying more than ever to acquire customers, then trying to convert them with a stack that only understands the fraction it already recognizes,” says Malachyte CEO Sidd Motwani. “Our technology reads behavior instead of logins or cookies, so it understands every visitor before their first click, and keeps sharpening with every action. That’s infrastructure built for how commerce works today.”
“Malachyte’s technology has driven our ability to recommend the right product at the right time across our entire user journey. It works for every visitor from the moment they land on our site, not just the ones we already recognize,” said Emilee Walch, VP of Digital Product at Brunt Workwear. “The ROI was clear quickly, and the results we’ve seen so far are just the beginning of what’s possible for us as a brand.”
Under the hood, Malachyte uses two-headed vector AI to understand preference and intent simultaneously, the same way an actual shopper does, leveraging visuals and context rather than keywords or tags. Because it’s persistent across channels, a signal picked up in search sharpens what that same shopper sees later on a product page, a category page, or in an email or SMS the next day. And it holds up in production: sub-200ms latency under Cyber Monday-level load, auto-scaling with no outages, a merchandiser control layer that gives operators the ability to set merchandising rules and overrides, and onboarding in as little as seven days.
McKinsey projects that, by 2030, agents could orchestrate up to $1 trillion of U.S. retail and, counterintuitively, that makes understanding real shopper behavior even more valuable.
“As commerce enters the agentic era, two major forces are converging: consumers have so much less patience when website or search experiences are not tailored to their intent, and agents are increasingly shaping the buyer journey. Yet most commerce infrastructure is not built to understand buyer intent in real time, whether that’s for a human or an agent.” says Maha Malik, Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners. “The Malachyte team has spent their careers solving some of the hardest problems in personalization at massive scale making them exceptionally well positioned to help brands meet this much higher bar for relevance.”
Malachyte’s platform is live with a growing roster of brands:
- HalloweenCostumes.com (Fun.com): +31% revenue per visitor
- Brunt Workwear: 80% lift in add-to-cart click-through rate
- Jordan Craig: 17% lift in new-visitor revenue per visit — significant given 80% of their traffic is first-time visitors with no purchase history
Funds from the seed round will be deployed across two priorities: scaling distribution of the existing infrastructure and hiring senior commercial and product leadership.
About Malachyte
Malachyte is a behavior intelligence company that increases revenue per visitor for consumer e-commerce brands, for every shopper, across every channel, from the first session. Built by the team behind Spotify’s personalization infrastructure, Malachyte’s Behavior Intelligence technology delivers real-time, adaptive personalization without cookies, logins, or pre-existing customer data. The company is headquartered in New York. Learn more at malachyte.com.
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SOURCE Malachyte
