With the ecommerce landscape rapidly evolving, we sat down with Zainab Hussain, an e-commerce strategist and expert in customer engagement, to discuss a groundbreaking shift: agentic infrastructure. We explore how this new AI-native approach, exemplified by Spangle AI’s recent $15 million funding round, is moving beyond simple optimization to create a unified, intelligent system for online retail. Our conversation delves into how this technology bridges the gap between off-site product discovery and on-site conversion, the mechanics behind its impressive performance gains for brands like Steve Madden and Revolve, and the future trajectory of AI-driven commerce.
What does “agentic infrastructure” mean in practice for a brand like Steve Madden? Can you walk us through how your software agents connect off-site product discovery with a real-time, on-site conversion path for a specific shopper journey?
Think of “agentic infrastructure” as creating a single, intelligent brain for a brand’s entire online presence. For a brand like Steve Madden, the shopper’s journey no longer begins on their website; it starts on social platforms, in AI-powered search results, or through recommendation engines. Our software agents act as the connective tissue. When a shopper clicks an ad for a specific boot they saw on a social feed, our agent doesn’t just send them to a generic landing page. It instantly analyzes the ad’s context, the product data, and what it knows about that shopper’s behavior. It then crafts a real-time, personalized path on the Steve Madden site, ensuring the experience is a seamless continuation of that initial discovery. It’s about making discovery and execution operate as one unified system, not two separate, fragmented steps.
You’ve noted that traditional ecommerce systems suffer from slow feedback cycles. How does your AI reasoning engine create a faster, more intelligent loop between advertising context and the on-site experience? Please share a detailed example of this in action.
The core problem with traditional systems is the lag. A brand runs a campaign, waits for data, analyzes it days later, and then makes manual changes. It’s a slow, clunky process. Our AI reasoning engine collapses that feedback loop into milliseconds. Imagine a shopper engages with a Revolve ad targeting festival-goers. The moment they land on the site, our commerce-specific AI engine is already at work. It understands the “festival” context from the ad, analyzes the product data for relevant items, and observes the shopper’s real-time clicks. If they hover over a certain style, the system learns and instantly refines the product recommendations on that very page. This performance data is continuously fed back into the system, so the next shopper from that same ad campaign gets an even more refined experience. It’s a dynamic, self-improving loop that traditional stacks simply can’t replicate.
With early customers like Revolve and Alexander Wang, you’ve seen conversion lifts of up to 50%. What specific inefficiencies in paid traffic or on-site experiences does your platform typically identify and correct to achieve such significant performance gains for these brands?
The biggest inefficiency we see is the jarring disconnect between the ad and the landing page. Brands spend a fortune on highly targeted ads that create a specific desire, only to dump the user onto a generic page that doesn’t acknowledge that initial context. It’s a frustrating experience for the shopper and a massive waste of ad spend. Our platform corrects this by ensuring the on-site experience is a direct, intelligent continuation of the ad. We’ve seen this double the return on advertising for some customers because we’re not just sending traffic; we’re guiding an interested shopper down a personalized path. Achieving conversion lifts of up to 50% comes from eliminating that friction, making the journey from discovery to purchase feel intuitive and personal.
As you allocate this new $15 million toward R&D and AI model advancement, what are the next key capabilities you aim to build? How will these enhancements further differentiate your platform from other retail technology solutions on the market?
This new funding is all about deepening our AI’s intelligence and autonomy. While many solutions in the market are “point solutions” that fix one small problem, we’re building a truly AI-native infrastructure for the entire commerce workflow. A major focus for our R&D will be advancing the reasoning capabilities of our AI models, making them even better at understanding nuanced shopper intent and market trends. The goal is to move beyond simple personalization to more automated and predictive commerce workflows. Our differentiation comes from being the foundational, intelligent layer that other tools plug into, rather than just being another tool in a fragmented stack. That’s the conviction that investors saw in our approach.
Your revenue run rate reportedly quadrupled in a single quarter last year. What aspects of your technology or business model are driving this rapid adoption, and how do you plan to sustain that momentum as you scale your engineering team?
The explosive growth, including a 57% average month-over-month increase in traffic through our platform, is driven by tangible results. When brands see you can deliver conversion increases of up to 50%, they listen. We signed nine major enterprise customers, collectively representing about $3.8 billion in sales, in our first nine months because they are feeling the pain of inefficient ad spend and disconnected systems. They need a solution that works now. To sustain this, the new $21 million in total funding is critical. We are aggressively expanding our engineering team to not only support our growing customer base but also to accelerate the advancement of our AI models, ensuring we stay ahead of the curve and continue to deliver that compelling ROI.
What is your forecast for agentic ecommerce?
Agentic ecommerce isn’t just a feature; it’s the next fundamental architecture for online retail. As consumer behavior shifts decisively toward AI-powered discovery, having a passive website is no longer enough. Brands that thrive in this new era will be those that have an intelligent, agentic system that actively engages customers from the very first moment of interest, wherever that may be. We’re talking about a global commerce market estimated at $6.8 trillion, and the winners will be those who build on AI-native infrastructure. It’s a complete paradigm shift from a static catalog of products to a dynamic, reasoning system that orchestrates the entire shopping journey in real time.
