Loops Smart AI raised $3.5M in seed funding to build a single AI layer for online retail. Andreessen Horowitz’s speedrun accelerator led the round, joined by NTT Docomo, Connecticut Innovations, Alumni Ventures and Monday Capital.
Chief executive Ari Nazir argues that the common approach is backwards. Retailers tend to add one tool at a time, a search helper here and a support chatbot there, then a product description generator and a virtual try-on. Each works alone, understands a sliver of the customer journey, and leaves staff to stitch the pieces together.
The company’s origin story is one of those gaps. Co-founder Ilker Selim Zorluoglu was trying to buy a gift online while on holiday in Bali, needed to ask the retailer a question, messaged several times, and never got a reply. He bought nothing.
Loops proposes five components inside one system: natural language search and discovery, a real-time shopping assistant, a product enrichment tool that standardizes messy catalog data, and virtual try-on. Because the pieces share a catalog and a business context, the system can follow intent from first landing through checkout.
The bet is that fragmented tooling is a data problem rather than a feature problem. Nazir said shoppers have grown comfortable asking questions in plain language while retail still depends on dropdown menus and keyword search, and that closing that gap requires infrastructure rather than another widget.
