What are the current funding trends in AI Shopping?

All funding deals in the AI shopping market over the last years

Below is the table listing all the deals. You can find our methodology at the end of this page.

If you want a deeper understanding of the market and its current dynamics, get our report covering the AI Shopping Market.

Is AI shopping funding actually weaker right now?

AI shopping funding is clearly weaker today: roughly the same number of companies are raising as last year, but they are raising much less money.

We counted 23 financings and 23 funded companies in the current comparable period, exactly matching audited 2025. Capital moved the other way, falling to $136.3 million from more than $216.7 million. The median round also dropped from $2.83 million to $2.00 million.

The two-year comparison makes the slowdown harder to dismiss. The market had 26 deals in the same period of 2024, raised more than $202.2 million and had a $4.17 million median round. Deal activity has softened since then, while the typical check has roughly halved.

The current market is still producing startups that can raise. What has changed much more dramatically is how much capital investors are willing to put behind them.

Metric	2026 YTD	2025 comparable	2024 comparable	2026 vs 2025
Deals	23	23	26	0.0%
Unique companies	23	23	25	0.0%
Total capital	$136.3M	>$216.7M	>$202.2M	at least -37.1%
Capital excluding >$50M rounds	$136.3M	$156.7M	>$202.2M	-13.0%
Median round	$2.00M	$2.83M	$4.17M	-29.3%
Average round	$5.93M	>$9.42M	$8.42M	at least -37.1%
Largest round	$35.0M	>$60M	$50.0M	at least -41.7%
First-financing share	39.1%	47.8%	38.5%	-8.7 pp
Follow-on share	60.9%	52.2%	57.7%	+8.7 pp
Series B+ deals	0	1	2	-1
Top-five capital share	66.5%	≥70.2%	<63.3%	lower

Are fewer AI shopping startups raising, or are investors just writing smaller checks?

AI shopping deal formation is holding up surprisingly well; the real weakness is the size of the checks.

The unchanged comparable-period deal count tells us that investors have not suddenly stopped financing the category. The capital generated by those financings has fallen much faster than transaction volume, while the typical round has become smaller.

Full-year context makes the gap easy to see. The market has already completed 74% as many deals as it did in all of 2025, yet it has generated less than 53% of 2025's full-year capital. Against 2024, it has reached around two-thirds of the full-year deal count but less than half of the capital.

We would not mechanically annualize those figures because venture rounds arrive unevenly. Still, deal frequency is holding up far better than dollars deployed.

For founders, the difference is simple: capital has become harder to obtain in size, even though getting a financing done remains fairly common.

Is the AI shopping funding drop mostly a Gensmo hangover?

The AI shopping funding drop is partly a Gensmo comparison effect, but the slowdown survives once we strip that round out.

Gensmo raised more than $60 million in the prior-year period. Once we remove every financing above $50 million, 2025 capital falls to $156.7 million. Current funding stays at $136.3 million because there is no current round above that threshold.

That reduces the apparent year-on-year decline from at least 37% to 13%.

A 13% decline tells a much milder story than the headline number, so Gensmo clearly inflated the prior-year comparison. Yet the market still comes out weaker after the adjustment.

The 2024 comparison is tougher. There was no round above $50 million in that comparable period, and current ex-megaround capital remains at least 32.6% lower. Smaller rounds across the rest of the market are therefore doing real work in the decline.

Outlier test	2026 YTD	2025 comparable	2024 comparable
Total capital	$136.3M	>$216.7M	>$202.2M
Capital excluding >$50M	$136.3M	$156.7M	>$202.2M
Gap versus current after >$50M exclusion	-	-13.0%	at least -32.6%
Median round	$2.00M	$2.83M	$4.17M
Largest round	$35.0M	>$60M	$50.0M
Top-one capital share	25.7%	≥27.7%	<24.7%
Top-three capital share	49.1%	≥55.8%	<47.0%
Top-five capital share	66.5%	≥70.2%	<63.3%
Rounds above $50M	0	1	0

Are big AI shopping rounds disappearing?

Large AI shopping rounds are getting much harder to find, and that explains more of the market slowdown than any explosion in tiny financings.

Deals below $5 million now represent 65.2% of measurable rounds, up from 60.9% last year and 58.3% two years ago. That is a steady increase, although hardly a dramatic one.

The middle of the market has barely changed in volume. Seven current rounds fall between $5 million and $20 million, representing 30.4% of deals, exactly the same share as last year. Those seven financings account for 57.7% of all current capital.

The big change comes above them. Phia's $35 million Series A is the only current financing between $20 million and $50 million, while nothing exceeds $50 million. Two years ago, Daydream raised $50 million. Last year, Gensmo went above $60 million.

The current funding market has compressed from the top. Small rounds are becoming a little more common, while very large checks have almost vanished.

Are new AI shopping startups having a harder time raising?

New AI shopping startups can still get funded, but first-time financing has become much thinner.

We identified nine current first financings, down from 11 in comparable 2025. The bigger difference is capital: those companies raised $27.5 million in total, versus more than $99.5 million for last year's first-financing cohort.

Current newcomers include 40rty.ai, Botsi, Era, Keep Converting, Lemrock, Malachyte, Naratix, PageMind and Wassist. Malachyte's $10 million round and Lemrock's roughly $7 million financing are the largest among them. Most of the rest are small Seed or pre-Seed-sized rounds.

Follow-ons have held up far better. Existing funded companies raised $108.8 million currently, compared with $117.1 million last year. That is only about a 7% drop.

Our first-financing classification uses publicly traceable financing histories rather than a full reconstruction of every company's cap table, so we treat it as directional. The gap is still large enough to show where investor caution has increased most.

First vs follow-on metric	2026 YTD	2025 comparable	2024 comparable
First financings	9	11	10
First-financing share	39.1%	47.8%	38.5%
First-financing capital	$27.53M	>$99.54M	>$74.88M
Median first financing	$1.50M	$1.70M	$2.20M
Follow-ons	14	12	15
Follow-on share	60.9%	52.2%	57.7%
Follow-on capital	$108.80M	$117.13M	>$124.81M
Median follow-on	$2.88M	$5.41M	$4.75M
Current capital gap vs 2025	first financings sharply lower	follow-ons much more resilient	-

Is AI shopping still stuck at Seed and Series A?

AI shopping remains overwhelmingly an early-stage funding market today, with no current Series B+ cohort in our audited sample.

Seventeen of the 23 current deals are Seed and three are Series A. The remaining three have an unknown stage. Among financings where we can establish the stage, every single one is therefore Seed or Series A.

Series A can still command serious money. Three Series A deals absorb 37.6% of current capital, helped heavily by larger rounds at Phia and Spangle. Investors are clearly willing to put substantial amounts behind selected early winners.

We cannot say that the market has become younger in terms of company age. That field failed our quality check. Nineteen of the 23 current records show a founding year of 2009, including companies that obviously appeared much later. Once those values are removed, only four current companies have usable founding dates.

For maturity, stage tells us something useful right now. Company age does not.

Which parts of AI shopping are investors paying more attention to now?

AI shopping investors are moving toward Recommendations, Commerce Decision Support and a much wider crop of Merchandising Tools.

AI Recommendations has gone from one comparable deal two years ago to two last year and three currently. Known capital moved from $0.5 million to $9.2 million and then $26.3 million.

Commerce Decision Support has also broken out. The category now has four current financings and $32.8 million of capital after producing only one comparable deal last year.

Merchandising Tools has become the busiest category by deal count, with nine financings. The catch is that those deals are much smaller than last year's cohort.

At the other end, Product Search continues to shrink and Product Advice Engines produced no current financing at all.

AI shopping category	2026 deals	2026 capital	2026 median	2025 deals	2024 deals
AI Merchandising Tools	9	$30.84M	$2.00M	3	6
AI Shopping Assistants	5	$44.25M	$1.10M	10	6
Commerce Decision Support	4	$32.75M	$6.63M	1	2
AI Recommendations	3	$26.31M	$10.00M	2	1
AI Product Search	2	$2.18M	$1.09M	4	6
Product Advice Engines	0	$0	-	3	5
Total market	23	$136.3M	$2.00M	23	26

Is AI Product Search really fading?

AI Product Search is fading quickly in funding terms, while Product Advice Engines have fallen even further.

Product Search moved from six comparable deals in 2024 to four in 2025 and just two currently. Its share of known capital has collapsed from roughly 57% two years ago to only 1.6% now.

The current deals are Beni at $815,000 and PageMind at roughly $1.37 million. Compare that with the 2024 cohort, when Daydream raised $50 million, Constructor raised $25 million and Vantage Discovery raised $16 million.

Product Advice shows an equally clean direction in deal count: five, then three, then zero.

Those two categories are closely tied to classic shopper-facing discovery and advice. Their multi-year decline stands out because other parts of AI shopping are moving the opposite way at the same time.

Why are AI Recommendations and Decision Support getting more funding?

AI Recommendations and Commerce Decision Support are becoming the clearer growth pockets as AI shopping moves deeper into personalization and purchase decisions.

The current companies are solving increasingly specific problems around what a shopper should see or choose. Spangle adapts onsite recommendations to shopper context. Malachyte focuses on real-time recommendation intelligence. eComID combines shopper context, sizing and personalized discovery. CATCHES helps fashion shoppers judge fit and drape. Replenit selects individualized recommendations, offers, channels and timing.

Major commerce platforms are simultaneously building more of the shared infrastructure around agentic discovery. Google's Universal Commerce Protocol now supports capabilities such as real-time product details, inventory, pricing, carts and merchant integration.

That changes where a startup can create something scarce. Basic AI product discovery is increasingly becoming part of larger commerce ecosystems, while retailer-specific context, recommendation quality and decision logic remain harder problems.

The funding data cannot prove that platform development caused this category rotation. The timing and product mix line up closely enough that it is a useful explanation for why investors are moving toward these layers now.

Why are AI Merchandising Tools getting so many deals but such small rounds?

AI Merchandising Tools are attracting far more deals today, mostly at Seed-sized ticket sizes.

Nine Merchandising Tools companies raised in the current period, compared with three last year. Yet the category's median round collapsed from $16 million to $2 million.

ReFiBuy's $13.6 million financing and Flock AI's $6 million round sit at the larger end. The rest includes companies such as 40rty.ai, Botsi, Era, Keep Converting, Merchantee, Naratix and Nudge, mostly around the $1 million to $2 million range.

Their products cover catalog optimization, product-data enrichment, AI-ready merchandising, personalized storefronts and visual content. Those are practical problems for merchants trying to make products understandable and attractive to both humans and shopping agents.

The category looks busy rather than mature. Many teams are getting funded, but investors are still testing the space with relatively modest checks.

Did AI Shopping Assistants peak last year?

AI Shopping Assistants look like they hit a funding-volume spike last year and have cooled since.

Comparable deal count moved from six in 2024 to ten in 2025 and back to five currently. That pattern makes the prior year look more like a spike than the middle of a steady upward trend.

Gensmo also made last year's capital look exceptionally strong with its more than $60 million financing. This year, Phia accounts for $35 million of the category's $44.25 million total.

The remaining current Shopping Assistant rounds are much smaller: Lemrock raised roughly $7 million, Wassist $1.1 million, Poltio $650,000 and Zave roughly $498,000.

Shopping assistants remain a real category with meaningful funding. Investors simply appear much more selective about which assistant deserves a large round.

Is Europe really catching North America in AI shopping funding?

Europe has genuinely gained AI shopping deal share this year, while North America still attracts most of the money.

Europe accounts for ten current financings, or 43.5% of deals, up from five deals and 21.7% in comparable 2025. North America moved in the other direction, from 52.2% of deals to 39.1%.

The European change goes well beyond eComID's $17 million financing. Removing that round still leaves roughly $29.1 million of current European capital, more than four times the comparable European total we calculated for last year.

Geographic breadth has expanded too. We found current financings across 13 countries, versus eight in the prior-year period, even though the overall number of deals did not increase.

North America still takes 61.9% of current dollars because several of the bigger rounds are based there. The regional story these days is broader startup formation in Europe alongside continued North American dominance in check size.

Are the same investors still leading AI shopping rounds?

AI shopping lead investors have almost completely turned over this year.

We identified 27 disclosed current lead or co-lead investor names, versus 26 in the comparable prior-year period. Twenty-one of the 23 current financings disclose a lead or co-lead, so coverage is unusually good.

NewRoad Capital Partners is the only current lead appearing twice, through Spangle and ReFiBuy. Every other disclosed current lead appears once.

More strikingly, the current roster has zero exact-name overlap with the audited comparable 2025 roster. Last year's list included investors such as Menlo Ventures, Thrive Capital, VMG Partners, Fuse VC, Inspired Capital and Vertex Ventures.

That does not mean those firms have abandoned AI shopping. Most appeared only once in last year's sample. What we can say confidently is that the sponsor base is turning over very quickly while the number of active lead investors remains healthy.

Investor interest has become different rather than visibly narrower.

Are strategic investors showing up more often in AI shopping rounds?

Strategic investors are showing up in more AI shopping deals, although four current transactions are still too few to call this a lasting shift.

We classify four current financings as involving a strategic investor, equal to 17.4% of deals. Comparable 2025 had two, or 8.7%, while 2024 had three.

The current examples are spread across the market. Stadium invested in eComID, Rakuten Capital participated in InsightX, Sia backed Lemrock and Gradient Ventures participated in Malachyte under our strategic-investor classification.

The round sizes are hardly exploding. The median current strategic financing is $8.5 million, below the $12 million median from last year's two deals.

What has increased is the frequency of strategically connected capital rather than the size of those investments. We would watch another year of data before treating that as a structural change.

Why is AI shopping adoption growing while funding is cooling?

AI shopping adoption can keep growing while venture funding cools because those two measures track very different things.

Shopify's Q1 2026 commerce data showed AI-referred orders growing nearly 13 times year over year and referral sessions from AI chatbots growing more than eight times. The company has also emphasized product-data quality, inventory, pricing and transaction infrastructure as key requirements for merchants trying to sell through AI-driven discovery.

Payments are moving in the same direction. Visa introduced Intelligent Commerce Connect to make it easier for agents and merchants to handle payment initiation, tokenization and authentication through a common integration.

Google has also been pushing agentic shopping deeper into mainstream commerce infrastructure through the Universal Commerce Protocol and related shopping products.

Commercial adoption can accelerate while investors become pickier about which independent startups own a defensible piece of the stack.

We currently have both at once: more evidence that AI is influencing shopping behavior, alongside smaller venture checks and less money going into newly financed companies.

Where is AI shopping funding heading now?

AI shopping funding is moving toward merchant intelligence, recommendations and decision infrastructure, with investors demanding more proof before writing large checks.

The category map has changed quickly. Recommendations and Decision Support are gaining both activity and dollars. Merchandising Tools are producing a large number of smaller financings. Product Search and Product Advice have lost momentum. Shopping Assistants remain relevant, but the prior-year wave has cooled.

The company-level pattern matches that shift. ReFiBuy is working on AI-ready product catalogs. Spangle sits around adaptive recommendations. Malachyte is building recommendation intelligence. eComID adds shopper context and sizing. CATCHES tackles product evaluation. These businesses operate closer to the merchant's data, conversion decision or transaction economics.

At the same time, the market still lacks a broad later-stage layer. Capital is available for selected Series A companies, while the absence of current Series B+ deals shows how young this ecosystem remains.

The clearest current pattern is stable deal formation combined with a fast-changing product focus. AI shopping startups are still getting created and funded, but the definition of what investors want to fund is moving quickly.

What is actually changing in funding?

AI shopping is weaker in capital terms than it was in either comparable prior period.

The decline becomes much less dramatic after removing the prior-year Gensmo round, but smaller typical checks and the much weaker 2024 comparison confirm that there is a genuine slowdown underneath the outlier effect.

Investors are becoming more selective about new entrants. First-time financings still happen regularly, while large first checks have become rare. Follow-on capital has held up much better, which leaves a greater share of funding with companies that have already proved enough to raise before.

Investor attention is also moving inside the market. Classic Product Search and Product Advice have lost ground, while Recommendations, Commerce Decision Support and merchant-side Merchandising Tools are attracting more activity. This is currently one of the clearest structural changes in the dataset.

The market remains very early-stage. Seed and Series A account for every financing where we can establish the stage, and there is no current Series B+ cohort. A few early winners can still raise meaningful rounds, but broad growth-stage financing has yet to arrive.

Funding has also become more geographically dispersed. Europe has doubled its deal share versus last year, the number of funded countries has expanded sharply and North America's deal dominance has weakened. North America still attracts the bigger checks.

The trend we would treat most cautiously is the rise in strategic-investor participation. Four current deals can move the percentage quickly. Company-age comparisons deserve even more caution: the founding-year field failed our audit so badly that we excluded it from any structural conclusion.

Taken together, AI shopping currently looks like a young market becoming harder to finance indiscriminately. Commercial adoption is moving ahead, venture capital is becoming more selective, and money is rotating toward the parts of the stack that help merchants turn AI-driven discovery into actual purchasing decisions.