eko

In 2010, an Israeli musician named Yoni Bloch had a small, stubborn wish: he wanted his music videos to branch, so a viewer could nudge a story down a different path. That wish became a technology, the technology became a startup called Interlude, and fifteen years later the same core idea - video you can click, choose and act on - is helping run product pages at Walmart. The company is now called eko, and it has spent its life turning a novelty into infrastructure.

eko is a media-and-technology company based in New York City. Its work sits at the intersection of two things that usually live apart: cinematic storytelling and ecommerce plumbing. Where most online retail still leans on flat photos and a scroll of reviews, eko builds interactive, shoppable video - footage a shopper can tap into, rotate, question, and buy from without leaving the page.

From flat photos to video you can touch

The company's central claim is straightforward. A product page is the closest thing ecommerce has to a storefront, yet it usually asks the least of the shopper's attention. eko transforms product footage into shoppable, interactive video that "engages customers, answers questions, and guides decision-making, right on product detail pages," as the company puts it. In practice that means 360-degree product views, clickable hotspots, and short interactive clips built for a brand's own store or for marketplaces like Walmart and Amazon.

Under the newer, AI-focused banner, eko frames the mission as moving commerce "from item identification to item understanding." The pitch leans on some uncomfortable numbers the company cites about the state of retail data - that roughly 30% of the data in major retail catalogs contains errors, that around 61% of customers now use AI in some way to shop, and that the AI tools doing that shopping are training on ecommerce data that was never built for them. eko's answer is to capture product information hands-on and structure it so both people and machines can trust it.

The decision gap on the product page

Every online purchase hides a moment of doubt: is this the right size, the right finish, the thing I actually want? Static images rarely close that gap, and shoppers bounce. eko's interactive video is designed to answer the question in the moment it's asked - showing the product in motion, from every angle, with the details a buyer would otherwise leave to find elsewhere. Fewer unanswered questions tends to mean fewer abandoned carts and, eko argues, fewer returns.

There is a second, less visible problem eko has moved toward: the data underneath the media. If AI assistants are increasingly the ones reading product pages, then broken or thin catalog data quietly caps how well anything on top of it can perform. eko's verify-and-automate services - checking catalog data, automating item setup, structuring media for AI - are a bet that the winners in AI commerce will be the ones whose product data is actually correct.

What you can actually build with it

Customers, and one very large partner

eko sells to brands, direct-to-consumer companies, marketers and large retailers - but its defining relationship is with Walmart. The two first tied up in 2018 with a joint venture reported to be worth more than $200 million, originally aimed at interactive entertainment. That relationship has since shifted decisively toward retail: by 2025, Walmart was expanding eko's interactive product pages across hundreds of thousands of items on Walmart.com, Sam's Club and its mobile apps.

The clearest public glimpse of the model was "Cookshop," a series of interactive Walmart cooking videos featuring celebrity chefs - Sofia Vergara among them - where viewers could watch, choose their path, and buy the ingredients from inside the video. It captured the whole eko thesis in one product: entertainment and checkout collapsed into a single, clickable frame.

Interlude, and the art of reinvention

Most companies don't survive a pivot this large. eko started as Interlude, an interactive-entertainment startup backed by an unusually cinematic cap table - Sony Pictures Entertainment, MGM and Warner Music Group alongside venture investors Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital, Samsung and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors. It rebranded to eko in 2016. The technology - branching, clickable, choice-driven video - never really changed. What changed was the question the company pointed it at: not "how do we entertain?" but "how do we help someone decide?"

That reframing is why eko reads today as an AI-commerce company rather than a media curiosity. It kept the hard-won muscle in interactive video and aimed it at the most valuable screen in retail. Reinvention, in eko's case, beat pure invention.

A studio and a platform, not just a widget

Plenty of vendors now sell shoppable video - names like Firework, Tolstoy, Videowise, Mindstamp, Wirewax and Bambuser circle the same space, and large retailers build in-house 3D and retail-media tools too. eko's differentiator is depth on both ends: it operates as a production studio that captures the footage and as a platform that makes it interactive and measurable, with the data-verification layer underneath. Fewer competitors combine the craft of making the video with the plumbing of getting the data right for AI.

Where eko fits

eko is a B2B company. It earns through interactive-video production, platform and licensing arrangements, and its product-page technology - with the Walmart partnership serving as both a major customer and a distribution channel into one of the largest ecommerce catalogs on earth. It sits at the meeting point of three growing markets: retail media, ecommerce conversion tooling, and the emerging category of AI-ready product data. If AI assistants become the front door to online shopping, the companies that make product information trustworthy and vivid stand to matter more, not less. That is the market eko is playing for.

Fifteen years, one idea

Interviews & product demos

Questions, answered

What does eko do?

eko turns product footage and data into interactive, shoppable video and verified product data for online retail, helping brands and retailers lift engagement and conversion.

Who founded eko and when?

It was founded in 2010 as Interlude by Yoni Bloch, Barak Feldman and Tal Zubalsky, and rebranded to eko in 2016.

What is eko's relationship with Walmart?

eko has a multi-year partnership and a 2018 joint venture with Walmart - reportedly a $200M+ commitment - and now powers interactive product pages across Walmart.com, Sam's Club and mobile apps.

How much funding has eko raised?

As a startup, eko (then Interlude) raised roughly $36.5M from investors including Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital, Samsung and Innovation Endeavors, plus later strategic investment tied to the Walmart joint venture.

Where is eko based?

eko is headquartered in New York City, with historical roots and an office in Tel Aviv, Israel.