What Happens When AI Starts Buying, Not Just Browsing
Last week, we hosted our first official dinner, brought together by our lead investor, Gradient (Google's AI fund), and the conversation kept circling back to the same thing: agentic commerce is no longer a thought experiment. It's already reshaping how visitors discover products, how decisions get made, and what it means to truly personalize an experience.
The brands in the room, spanning apparel, beauty, health, and home, were each navigating this differently. Some are actively piloting AI-driven experiences. Others are watching closely, not quite ready to commit. But everyone agreed: the old playbook for personalization isn't built for what's coming.
That's exactly the problem we started Malachyte to solve.
The gap we kept seeing
My co-founder Ian Anderson and I spent nearly a decade building the personalization engine underneath Spotify, the system responsible for understanding what a listener wants right now, not just what they've liked before. The research behind it is published, and the core insight is simple but powerful: real-time preference modeling beats static segmentation every time.
When we looked at ecommerce, we saw the same problem Spotify had a decade ago. Most personalization today is rules-based and segment-driven, it tries to match a shopper to a bucket rather than understand them as an individual in the moment. That works fine when a human is browsing. It breaks down entirely when an AI agent is doing the buying.
What Malachyte does differently
We built an intelligence layer that cold-starts a unique user profile from the moment a visitor lands: no sign-in, no history, no third-party cookies required. As they engage, that profile learns in milliseconds, dynamically re-ranking the entire experience: search results, recommendations, collections, and packs. The longer they stay, the sharper the signal. But even in the first few seconds, we already know more than a segment ever could.
For merchants with structurally similar products, like the ones we talked through at dinner, this creates a real competitive edge. When everything looks similar at first glance, the ability to surface the right product for this shopper right now is what moves conversion.
Why now
Agentic commerce changes the stakes. When an AI agent is navigating a storefront on behalf of a buyer, there's no browsing, no impulse scroll, no second chance. The experience has to be right immediately. Our approach is designed exactly for that world — where understanding intent in real time isn't a nice-to-have, it's the whole game.
We're heads-down building toward our official launch, and dinners like this one remind us how much the market is ready for what comes next.
If you're a brand thinking about how personalization needs to evolve… we'd love to talk.
— Malachyte
Sidd Motwani
Co-founder & CEO