She raised $50 million in 2021 and disappeared for four years. In February 2026, Wizard - the AI shopping agent she runs with Marc Lore - showed up with a Best Buy partnership and a pitch to end the browser tab.
In 2017 Melissa Bridgeford left a Partner seat at Cain Hoy Enterprises, a private-investment firm best known for backing operators rather than being run by them, and started a company in Austin called Stylust. Stylust let you text a stylist and buy clothes without opening a website. In 2021 she moved to New York, folded Stylust into a new venture with Marc Lore, and called it Wizard. Same idea. Bigger runway. Same conviction that shopping should feel like sending a text.
The runway - a $50 million Series A led by NEA's Tony Florence, with Accel and Lore participating - closed in October 2021. Then Wizard went quiet. It stayed quiet for the entire ChatGPT arc. It stayed quiet while every venture deck pivoted to include the word "agent." It stayed quiet through the collapse of the direct-to-consumer euphoria, the collapse of the SPAC euphoria, and the collapse of the metaverse. On February 11, 2026, it emerged from stealth with a Best Buy partnership and a working product.
The product is exactly what Bridgeford was pitching in 2017, except now the branding matches the moment. Wizard is a chat interface. You describe what you want. It searches across retailers, ranks results based on customer reviews and editorial content rather than paid placement, and completes checkout. Bridgeford's public line is that the model is "0% ads, 100% shoppable results." Revenue comes from take rates and affiliate fees, not sponsored slots. That is either an unusually clean incentive structure or a very expensive way to lose to Google. Wizard is betting on the first.
The thing to understand about Bridgeford is that she is not a founder who found the AI wave. She is a founder who has been standing on the beach since 2017, insisting the wave was coming, watching most people walk back to their cars. She likes to point out that she used to text her Uber driver, her Postmates courier, and her Instacart shopper - three separate people in three separate apps who all communicated via SMS - but there was no equivalent way to actually buy something. That gap, in her telling, is where Wizard started. The gap is now a $50 million-funded company with a very specific bet: that shopping through an agent will be the default consumer motion by 2030.
Before Stylust, she spent five years as a Director at Guggenheim Partners and three more as a Partner at Cain Hoy. Before that, an MBA from Harvard Business School. Before that, a finance and real estate degree from Florida's Warrington College of Business. This is the standard path into private markets - the path that Cain Hoy alumni tend to stay on. Bridgeford did not. She started texting people about pants.
Wizard's structure gives Bridgeford CEO and Lore the cofounder-and-chairman title, which is roughly the arrangement Lore has used at every company he has started since Diapers.com. Lore builds category winners; his cofounders operate them. Wizard is Lore's fifth swing at a large consumer business. Bridgeford is the operator. If you want to know why the company waited four years to launch, the honest answer is probably that Lore-scale ambition takes Lore-scale patience, and Bridgeford was willing to wait.
What the company actually looks like today: a chat-based front end, a search layer that reads across product catalogs and third-party editorial, and a checkout stack that plugs into partner retailers natively. Best Buy is the flagship retailer at launch. Wizard's earlier B2B work, when the pitch was to brands about capturing conversions via text, is the substrate the consumer product is built on. Bridgeford has cited internal numbers of 30% conversion rates on text-based flows - roughly ten times what web e-commerce typically converts at. That's a number worth scrutinizing before you decide it's a business model, but it's the number she uses.
She also talks, sometimes in public, about "a world without websites." It's a phrase that lands differently depending on your job. If you sell paid search, it's a threat. If you sell a homepage, it's a threat. If you're a Shopify merchant paying Meta for retargeting, it is either a threat or a wish. Bridgeford, notably, does not present it as a threat. She presents it as an inevitability, and Wizard as one of the few companies positioned - because of when it started, because of who funded it, because of the eight years she has spent doing exactly this - to be there when the inevitability arrives.
Whether the inevitability arrives is the question. AI shopping agents are having a moment. Amazon has one. Google has one. Perplexity has one. Bridgeford's argument is that Wizard is the only one without the tension of also being an ad business. Google can't refuse paid placement without breaking Google. Amazon can't rank a competitor's product ahead of a Prime-eligible SKU without breaking Amazon. Wizard has no such constraint. It also has no such distribution, which is the flip side of the same coin. What it does have is four years of quiet building, a working product, and a CEO who has been convinced about text-based shopping since before ChatGPT existed.
The reason to pay attention now, in mid-2026, is that this is the moment where the thesis becomes falsifiable. Wizard is live. The Best Buy integration is real. Consumers can use it. Either the retention curves work or they don't. Either the take-rate-plus-affiliate math clears the CAC or it doesn't. Bridgeford has spent nearly a decade betting that they will. The next twelve months will tell us if the bet paid.
Bridgeford's public argument for text-based shopping rests on a single stat: conversion rates roughly ten times higher than typical web e-commerce. The chart below reproduces the claim.
Source: Bridgeford, interview with ForceBrands. Figures self-reported by Wizard.
Wizard began life as a B2B tool selling text-commerce infrastructure to brands. Between 2021 and 2026 it quietly rebuilt itself as a consumer-facing agent. The technology and the team came from Stylust. The distribution strategy came from Lore. The patience came from Bridgeford.
Texting has become the easiest way for us to communicate and engage, and texting is about to become the easiest way to shop.
The value of text commerce is not just in sales but in data and knowledge.
By 2030, AI Agents will have majority adoption as the primary shopping interface for consumers globally.
Wizard delivers shoppable search results 100% of the time with 0% ads. Shopping made simple.
The online shopping experience today is highly fragmented, and consumers are searching across multiple tabs, multiple websites, multiple social platforms to find and buy what they're looking for.
Stylust's product was an AI shopping agent before that term existed - the same product vision: a conversational interface, technology that found the best products from across the web, and universal checkout.
Bridgeford's stated goal is not to build a better shopping site. It is to remove the shopping site from the transaction entirely. In her telling, consumers will describe what they want, agents will do the work, and the retail homepage - the browser tab, the newsletter, the cart abandonment email - will fade to background infrastructure.
Whether that world arrives on her timeline or someone else's is the actual question. She has been convinced of it since 2017. She has now spent nine years betting on it.
She is the CEO and cofounder of Wizard, an AI-native shopping agent she launched with Marc Lore. Before Wizard she founded Stylust, an Austin-based text-commerce startup.
A chat-based AI shopping agent. It searches across retailers, ranks results without paid placement, and completes checkout for consumers. It launched publicly in February 2026.
A $50 million Series A in October 2021, led by NEA with participation from Accel and Marc Lore.
Founded Stylust in Austin in 2017. Before that, spent nearly a decade in finance at Guggenheim Partners and Cain Hoy Enterprises.
MBA from Harvard Business School; B.S. in Finance and Real Estate from the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business.