$3.5m · Seed · AI · Istanbul, Türkiye
Istanbul-based Loops, which builds AI search and shopping tools for retailers, has raised $3.5m in seed funding from a16z speedrun, NTT Docomo, Connecticut Innovations, Alumni Ventures and Monday Capital. According to the company announcement, the capital will fund product development, customer deployment capacity and international expansion.
One context layer across the shopping journey
Retailers often adopt AI one workflow at a time: one tool for search, another for customer questions, another for product descriptions and another for virtual try-on. Loops is trying to replace that patchwork with a shared layer for catalog data, business rules and shopper context. Its products cover semantic search, shopping and marketplace assistants, product enrichment and virtual try-on, so information captured in one part of the journey can improve the others.
That integration is the commercial proposition. Better product data can make both search results and assistant answers more useful, while the same conversation history can carry a shopper from discovery towards checkout. Loops says it has more than 70 customers and pilots, has handled millions of shopper experiences and has converted 64% of pilots into paying customers. At A101, the company reports that sessions using Loops showed about 83% higher purchase conversion than a comparison segment, while cautioning that this was observational rather than a randomized test. Mavi uses the platform for AI search and shopping assistance based on style, occasion and fit.
Deployment capacity is part of the product
The round’s emphasis on deployment capacity matters because Loops’ breadth creates both value and implementation work. Search, assistants and catalog enrichment become more defensible when they share context, but each retailer still has distinct catalogs, policies, channels and existing systems. The company must therefore turn customer-specific integrations into repeatable deployments without losing the domain detail that makes the agents useful.
a16z speedrun investment partner Fareed Mosavat framed the opportunity around making AI work reliably inside real businesses, where better customer experience can be tied to commercial outcomes. Loops also says it plans to extend its vertical operating-system approach into financial services and energy. That is an ambition rather than an achieved expansion: the near-term test is whether the seed capital helps the company reproduce its commerce deployments across more retailers and markets.
Sources checked:
Loops company announcement · Loops product site · SiliconANGLE · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
Image: Loops, via the company funding announcement.
