The prevailing vision for AI-enabled commerce is that a personal agent will shop on your behalf. Tell it you need new running shoes, and it already knows your size, budget, style, preferred brands, and injury history. It searches across retailers, compares inventory, reviews, prices, and return policies, then places the order without you ever visiting a storefront.

AI shops so you do not have to. That works well when you have a specific need to fulfill. But much of shopping is discovery. People browse, compare, change their minds, and develop preferences as they go. Sometimes the thing you buy is not the thing you set out to find. Rather than remove the shopper from the experience, AI can make the store itself more intelligent, adapting what it shows each person based on what they do in real time.

Sidd Motwani met Ian Anderson at Spotify, where they built the systems behind more than 90% of its recommendations. Those systems learned from more than 800 million listeners across a billion-item catalog and made Discover Weekly feel like it knew you. Now, Sidd and Ian have teamed up with Shivaditya Sinha to build Malachyte, the missing intent layer for commerce.

Today, Malachyte announced $10 million in funding co-led by Gradient and Bessemer Venture Partners.