ecommerce-ai
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Sonakshi Nathani and the Art of the Second Beginning
She left Microsoft to fix the WhatsApp confusion in her family's grocery shop. Then she did the harder thing: she rebuilt the company she had already proved she could grow.
Zowie Gives the Chatbot a Rulebook and a Real Job
Zowie wants customer-service AI to do more than compose a pleasant reply. Its pitch is built for the awkward, expensive middle of support: follow the policy, touch the right system, show the work, and know when a person should take over.
Samraaj Bath Keeps Turning Creative Restlessness Into Products
Before ION became an AI growth team for ecommerce, its founder sold chai ice cream from a garage, danced professionally and rebuilt a 1981 motorcycle. The through-line is less software than craft - and a stubborn wish to let more people make things.
Ben Vigoda Has Spent 25 Years Teaching Machines to Handle the Mess
Before AI could sell you a jacket, Ben Vigoda taught chips to reckon with uncertainty. Now the Product Genius CEO is applying the same obsession to every scroll, pause and click.
Ocula
Retailers spent years teaching product pages to rank for humans. Ocula is betting the next customer may be an algorithm - and rebuilding the catalogue for both.
Thomas McKenna
After years turning retail data into recommendations at dunnhumby, Deloitte and Bain, Thomas McKenna chose the harder brief: build the product, assemble the team and make advanced ecommerce AI useful beyond the largest retailers.
ion design
ion design is a San Francisco AI company (YC W24) building tools that let non-engineers ship real UI changes to a live codebase. It started by turning Figma designs into clean React code, grew into a Figma-like visual editor that opens branches and pull requests against your GitHub, and now runs autonomous AI product-design agents that create and test on-brand pages to grow revenue. Founded in 2023 by Samraaj Bath, it targets the gap between people who can ship code and the PMs, designers, and marketers who cannot.
Graas
Graas is a Singapore-based, AI-native commerce company that replaces fragmented dashboards and manual workflows with autonomous software agents. Its Agent Foundry lets direct-to-consumer and marketplace brands build custom AI agents that unify data across channels, SKUs and campaigns, then reason and act on it - from SKU recognition and order processing to demand forecasting and ad-spend attribution. Founded in 2022 by Prem Bhatia and Ashwin Puri, Graas supports 2,000+ brands and processes more than $1B in GMV across India and Southeast Asia.
Sravanth Aluru
Sravanth Aluru is the co-founder and CEO of Avataar, a generative AI company building spatial storytelling and 3D visualization tools for enterprises and e-commerce. An IIT Bombay engineer and Wharton MBA, he moved from a program manager role at Microsoft to technology investment banking on Wall Street before founding Avataar in 2014. He holds more than 10 US patents across AI, computer vision, and mobile data transmission, and has raised over $55 million from investors including Tiger Global, Peak XV (Sequoia Capital India). Under his leadership Avataar has shifted from interactive 3D product experiences toward AI-generated product video, serving customers such as HP, Victoria's Secret, Lowe's, Samsung, and Sleep Number.
Avataar
Avataar is a Bengaluru- and San Francisco-based AI company that turns static product pages into 3D visuals, interactive experiences, and AI-generated videos for retailers and brands. Founded in 2014 by Sravanth Aluru and co-founders, it began with computer-vision-driven 3D product visualization for e-commerce and has since expanded into a full-stack agentic AI platform and its own distilled video model, Varya, positioned as a cheaper, culturally aware alternative to models like Veo and Runway. Backed by Tiger Global and Peak XV (formerly Sequoia Capital India), Avataar has raised roughly $55 million and counts HP, Victoria's Secret, Lowe's, and others among its customers.