Loops raises $3.5 million to unify retail AI

Loops' pitch rests on a specific complaint from its co-founder and CEO, Ari Nazir: retailers typically bolt on AI one feature at a time — a search tool here, a chatbot there, then a product-description generator and a virtual try-on — and those tools end up running in siloes, each understanding only a small piece of the overall customer journey. The origin story he tells is a personal one: co-founder İlker Selim Zorluoğlu, while on vacation in Bali, tried to buy a gift for his two-year-old daughter, messaged the retailer across several channels, never got a reply and abandoned the purchase. What Nazir says the pair found was a bigger problem than unanswered messages — retailers lacked the infrastructure to operate in an AI-driven world, even as consumers grew comfortable asking AI questions in natural language.

The company's answer is one unified AI layer built on five core components: AI search and product discovery in natural language, a real-time shopping assistant, a product enrichment tool that cleans and standardizes catalog data so humans and AI can read it, and a virtual try-on tool. Because those sit in one system, Loops can track a shopper from the moment they land on a retailer's platform. Nazir describes the logic as a chain: better product information supports better search, better discovery supports more useful shopping conversations, and those interactions reveal further chances to improve the experience.

The stated ambition goes past retail. Nazir says commerce is the starting point but the larger goal is helping companies become "AI native", and Loops plans to expand into sectors such as financial services and energy. Fareed Mosavat of a16z Speedrun said that ambition, plus evidence the platform works reliably inside real businesses, is what drew the investment, pointing to Loops' pilot conversion results and early customer expansion.