Analysis
Loops Smart AI raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz's a16z Speedrun accelerator, with NTT Docomo, Connecticut Innovations, Alumni Ventures and Monday Capital also participating, SiliconANGLE reported. Co-founders Ari Nazir, who serves as CEO, and Ilker Selim Zorluoglu started the company after a frustrating attempt to buy a gift online while on vacation in Bali, according to the company.
The product is an AI layer that spans the full shopper journey: natural-language product search, a real-time shopping assistant, product catalog enrichment, and virtual try-on. Loops says it already has more than 70 retail customers, including supermarket chain A101, which reported an 83% increase in conversion rate, and coffee retailer Tchibo, which reported a 13.6% lift in average order value -- disclosed, named customer metrics that are unusually concrete for a $3.5 million seed round.
“That traction puts Loops into an increasingly contested category.”
That traction puts Loops into an increasingly contested category. Shopify has built its own AI shopping assistant, Sidekick, directly into its merchant platform; Klarna has pushed an AI shopping assistant into its consumer app; and Perplexity has built Perplexity Shopping as a natural-language purchase layer on top of its search product. Loops' differentiation, per Nazir, is treating commerce as a starting point rather than an endpoint: "Commerce is our starting point," he said, with the larger goal of helping retailers become "AI native" and eventually expand into financial services and energy. Fareed Mosavat of a16z Speedrun framed the bet similarly: "Loops is starting in commerce, where the link between a better AI experience and business value is unusually clear."
The risk is platform competition rather than product competition: Shopify and Klarna both have direct merchant relationships and payment rails Loops doesn't, which could let them bundle equivalent AI shopping features for free rather than compete on standalone merit. Loops' expansion into financial services and energy, two heavily regulated verticals with far stricter compliance requirements than retail, is unproven and distant. Nazir described the near-term ambition more modestly: "We want our customers to buy a business capability that they can depend on," suggesting the company's own near-term focus remains retail execution rather than the broader vertical expansion.
