Envive, a Seattle-based startup that builds AI agents for online retailers, raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Seattle-area venture firm FUSE.
The company’s software creates autonomous agents that help retail brands boost conversion, retention, and discoverability.
Brands such as Spanx, Coterie, Supergoop!, and Wine Enthusiast are using Envive’s AI-powered software to engage with customers as they shop on websites and apps. Envive also helps companies improve their visibility in generative AI search results.
Envive, previously known as Spiffy, is part of a broader trend as companies move from static websites and basic chatbots toward AI agents that can supercharge customer interactions. The company describes its approach as building “the intelligence layer for commerce.”
The platform offers several types of agents:
- a sales agent that guides customers to the right products
- a search agent that understands natural language queries
- a customer experience agent that handles support and escalations
- a copywriting agent that generates brand-safe content for product listings and marketing
GeekWire previously reported on the company’s earlier funding round in 2023. The startup originally spun out of the AI2 Incubator at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle. Envive’s core technology traces its roots to research at AI2.
Envive CEO Aniket Deosthali previously helped Walmart build its generative AI-powered shopping assistant. The company’s other co-founders include:
- Iz Beltagy, chief scientist at Envive and a lead researcher at AI2
- Matthew Peters, chief architect, led natural language processing and machine learning research projects at AI2. He left AI2 last year.
- Sameer Singh, CTO, was an AI Fellow at AI2 and is an associate professor at UC Irvine.
“Commerce is entering the agentic era,” Deosthali said in a statement. “Brands need more than just wrappers around LLMs. They need a system that continuously learns from real-world behavior and drives the outcomes they care about. That’s what we are building: self-improving agents with performance, control, and safety at their core.”
The company’s other investors include Point72 Ventures and the AI2 Incubator.
“I think their combination of advanced AI expertise and retail execution makes them uniquely positioned to lead the industry,” Sri Chandrasekar, managing partner at Point72 Ventures, said in a statement.
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