San Francisco, CA, Oct. 12, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Online shopping has become very good at showing people thousands of products and surprisingly bad at helping them choose one. Loops was built around the idea that AI can collapse those experiences into one continuous journey.
Loops founders (L to R) Ari Nazir and Ilker Selim Zorluoglu with CTO Yusuf Bahadir.
Today, the company announced a $3.5 million seed round from a16z speedrun, NTT Docomo, Connecticut Innovations, Alumni Ventures and Monday Capital. Loops will scale its AI platform for brands and retailers, helping businesses understand what a shopper is trying to accomplish, surface the right products and guide them through the decision without forcing the retailer to assemble multiple AI products behind the scenes. The funding will support product development, customer deployment capacity, and international expansion.
Why this matters today
AI is arriving in ecommerce one workflow at a time. One product improves search, another answers shopper questions, another writes product descriptions, another handles virtual try-on. Each is useful on its own, and the retailer is left to stitch them together. Loops builds around the same product knowledge, business context and customer journey, so each part sharpens the others: better catalog data improves search, search gives the assistant context, and customer conversations reveal where product information is weak.
"The biggest mistake we see is treating AI as a collection of features," said Ilker Selim Zorluoglu, President and Co-Founder of Loops. "A retailer does not need five different AI products that each understand one slice of the customer. It needs one system that understands the catalog, the business and what the shopper is trying to do. Commerce is where we are proving that model, and we think the same architecture can eventually become the AI operating layer for other industries as well."
How Loops works
Loops follows the shopper through the whole journey, from the first search to the moment they click buy. It starts with discovery: shoppers describe what they want in plain language, the way they would to a friend or to ChatGPT, and AI search surfaces the right products without keywords, filters or a retailer's internal catalog logic getting in the way. When questions come up, a built-in shopping assistant answers them on the spot, helps people decide, and carries service conversations across every connected channel, so no shopper is left waiting hours for a reply.
Loops in action: The Mavi shopping assistant making outfit recommendations.
What makes that possible is the layer underneath. Product enrichment rewrites descriptions, attributes and catalog data until every product is fully legible to customers and AI systems alike, which is what lets search and the assistant give answers a retailer can trust. Virtual try-on then closes the gap between browsing and buying by letting shoppers see the product on themselves before they commit. Each piece feeds the next, and the result is a shopping experience that feels like talking to someone who knows the catalog inside out.
Loops enables the Mavi shopping assistant to make size recommendations.
The journey
Loops started with a failed purchase. Co-founders Ari Nazir and İlker Selim Zorluoğlu were in Bali when İlker tried to buy a gift for his two-year-old daughter, messaged the retailer, and waited hours for a reply. He never bought it. The founders dug into why and found a bigger gap than slow support: shoppers were already telling AI what they wanted in plain language, while most of ecommerce still ran on keyword search, filters and separate support queues.
In a mere weekend, Nazir built the first prototype of what has now become a company that has over 70 customers and pilots, and has handled millions of shopper experiences, with sixty-four percent of pilots converting into paying customers.
Early evidence at retail scale
Turkish supermarket chain A101 uses Loops to help customers navigate its catalog and get assistance throughout the buying journey. In Loops' published comparison, sessions involving the platform showed roughly 83% higher observed purchase conversion than the comparison segment, a result the company notes is observational rather than a randomized measure. Fashion retailer Mavi uses Loops for AI search and shopping assistance, letting customers describe what they want by style, occasion or fit and get guided through the catalog. Together they point to ecommerce that behaves like a strong in-store experience: the shopper explains what they want, the system understands the inventory, and help follows them to the decision.
"AI is changing the interface between companies and their customers, but the lasting platforms will be the ones that can make it work reliably inside real businesses," said Fareed Mosavat, Investment Partner at a16z Speedrun. "Loops is starting in commerce, where the link between a better AI experience and business value is unusually clear. Its pilot conversion and early customer expansion show brands want a platform that can own more of that journey."
From commerce to vertical AI operating systems
Commerce is the first chapter. Loops believes the lasting opportunity in enterprise AI belongs to systems built deeply inside individual industries, carrying the knowledge, integrations, agents and controls needed to run real workflows, rather than a general-purpose model with a thin wrapper. The playbook is the one that worked in commerce: enter through a specific problem with obvious value, work closely enough with customers to learn how the industry actually operates, then turn what repeats into product.
Financial services and energy are next. Alongside them, Loops is building specialized small-language-model capabilities for tasks where domain knowledge and deployment constraints make a focused model the better tool. The goal is to make companies AI-native, with AI woven into how the business runs rather than bolted on as features. Commerce is the first operating system. The next ones are already being built.
Media images can be found here.
About Loops
Loops is an enterprise AI company that builds agentic commerce and automation systems for e-commerce brands. Today, businesses can adopt its AI Search & Shopping Assistants (24/7 AI shopping assistants that guide customers from discovery to checkout) and Marketplace Assistants (automated, in-brand customer support and answers across online marketplaces, Product Enrichment (tools that automatically structure and fill in missing attributes and descriptions for product catalogs) and Virtual Try-On (an interactive sizing and visual try-on tools designed to build buyer confidence and reduce returns).
Loops is a venture backed enterprise. For more information please visit: https://loopsai.com/
