Former Spotify exployees land $10 million in seed funding for behaviour intelligence startup Malachyte
New York headquartered Malachyte has announced the close of a $10 million seed funding round co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Gradient Ventures with participation from Harpoon Ventures. The startup was co-founded by Sidd Motwani (CEO), Ian Anderson (CTO), and Shivaditya Sinha (COO), the team behind the behavioural intelligence infrastructure that powers Spotify recommendations across millions of users and items. They say that they’re now bringing that same technology to retailers and e-commerce brands.
Malachyte's platform is live with brands including HalloweenCostumes.com, Brunt Workwear, and Jordan Craig. Funds from the seed round will be deployed across two priorities: scaling distribution of the existing infrastructure and hiring senior commercial and product leadership.
"Brands are paying more than ever to acquire customers, then trying to convert them with a stack that only understands the fraction it already recognises," says Motwani. "Our technology reads behaviour instead of logins or cookies, so it understands every visitor before their first click, and keeps sharpening with every action. That's infrastructure built for how commerce works today."
"Malachyte's technology has driven our ability to recommend the right product at the right time across our entire user journey. It works for every visitor from the moment they land on our site, not just the ones we already recognise," says Emilee Walch, VP of Digital Product at Brunt Workwear. "The ROI was clear quickly, and the results we've seen so far are just the beginning of what's possible for us as a brand."
Under the hood, Malachyte uses two headed vector AI to understand preference and intent simultaneously, the same way an actual shopper does, leveraging visuals and context rather than keywords or tags. Because it's persistent across channels, a signal picked up in search sharpens what that same shopper sees later on a product page, a category page, or in an email or SMS the next day. And it holds up in production, those involved claim, citing as proof: sub-200ms latency under Cyber Monday level load, auto-scaling with no outages, a merchandiser control layer that gives operators the ability to set merchandising rules and overrides, and onboarding in seven days.
"As commerce enters the agentic era, two major forces are converging: consumers have so much less patience when website or search experiences are not tailored to their intent, and agents are increasingly shaping the buyer journey. Yet most commerce infrastructure is not built to understand buyer intent in real time, whether that’s for a human or an agent." says Maha Malik, Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners. "The Malachyte team has spent their careers solving some of the hardest problems in personalisation at massive scale, making them exceptionally well positioned to help brands meet this much higher bar for relevance.”
2026 RTIH Innovation Awards
AI will be a key focus area at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards.
The awards are now open for entries and celebrate global retail technology innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world.
Our winners will be revealed at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Ceremony, taking place at The HAC in Central London on Wednesday, 4th November.
Check out our 2025 winners here.
Our 2025 hall of fame entrants were revealed during a sold out event which took place at The HAC on 16th October and consisted of a drinks reception, three course meal, and awards ceremony presided over by award winning comedian, actress and writer Tiff Stevenson.
In his welcome speech, Scott Thompson, Founder and Editor, RTIH, said: “This is the awards’ fifth year as a physical event. We started off with just 30 people at the South Place Hotel not far from here, then moved to London Bridge Hotel, then The Barbican, and last year RIBA’s HQ in the West End.”
“But I’m conscious of the fact that, to quote the legend that is Taylor Swift, You’re only as hot as your last hit, baby. So, this year we’ve moved to our biggest venue yet, and also pulled in our largest number of entries to date and broken attendance records.”
He added: “This year’s submissions have without doubt been our best yet. To quote one of the judges: The examples of innovative developments across both traditional and digital retail spaces were truly remarkable.”
Congratulations to our winners, and a big thank you to our sponsors, judging panel, the legend that is Tiff Stevenson, and all those who attended our 2025 gathering.
