ReFiBuy raises $13.6M to help e-commerce brands surface in AI-driven shopping

A quiet shift is underway in online retail. Fewer shoppers are starting their journey on traditional search pages. More are turning to AI assistants that recommend what to buy, compare options, and increasingly make decisions on their behalf. That shift is forcing brands to rethink how their products show up online.

ReFiBuy is betting that most companies are not ready for it.

The Raleigh, North Carolina-based AI startup has just raised $13.6 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by NewRoad Capital Partners. The round drew participation from Ridge Ventures, Silicon Road Ventures, Incubate Fund, and VELA Partners, with continued backing from G20 Ventures, Commerce Ventures, and Knoll Ventures. The funding will go toward scaling its Commerce Intelligence Engine and expanding its go-to-market efforts as retailers adjust to a new kind of shopper. That shopper is not always human.

The shift from search results to AI recommendations

AI shopping agents are starting to act as the front door for commerce. Bain & Company estimates that agent-driven shopping could reach between $300 billion and $500 billion in U.S. sales by 2030. That would account for a meaningful slice of online retail. At the same time, traffic from traditional search channels is slipping. Brands are seeing demand shift from keyword-based discovery to systems that interpret intent and make plain-language recommendations.

Most product catalogs were never built for that. They were structured for browsing pages, marketplace feeds, and search rankings. AI agents evaluate products differently. They look for context, relevance, and signals that go beyond a basic title or description. That gap is where ReFiBuy is focused.

The company’s platform operates at the catalog level, where visibility decisions are increasingly made. Its Commerce Intelligence Engine analyzes how AI systems interpret each product, then reshapes that data so it can be surfaced in conversational queries. The platform enriches product information, distributes updates across channels, and tracks how listings perform over time. The goal is to keep catalogs aligned with how AI agents rank and recommend products as those systems continue to evolve.

“This Seed round represents both the strong interest from the investment community in Agentic Commerce and solidifies our leadership position in the space,” said Scot Wingo, CEO and Co-founder of ReFiBuy. “We plan to leverage the Seed to accelerate our platform as well as our go-to-market motion to match the urgency our customers and prospects are feeling from this tectonic change.”

Investors see the shift as structural, not incremental.

“Product data is becoming the most important infrastructure layer in commerce, and ReFiBuy is building it,” said Stefan Sterns, Partner at NewRoad Capital Partners. “Scot and his team bring exactly the combination we back: deep operator experience in commerce, a clear-eyed view of where the market is going, and a product already delivering results for sophisticated brands and retailers.”

The pressure on retailers is growing as AI-generated queries multiply. Each prompt can surface a different set of products, often with little overlap. That creates a scale problem that manual optimization cannot keep up with.

“Retailers and brands are struggling to make sure every one of their SKUs is relevant for the millions of unique LLM-based queries,” said Matt Nichols, Partner at Commerce Ventures. “Fortunately, Scot has been building solutions for this customer set for decades, and knows what it takes to optimize product data for maximum visibility and sales.”

ReFiBuy’s roots trace back to teams with experience at ChannelAdvisor, now part of Rithum, and Walmart. That background shows up in the company’s focus on large-scale catalog management and retail operations. The platform is already being used by brands across categories such as beauty, fashion, electronics, and home goods.

“Scot and the team have turned ReFiBuy into the go-to source for the emerging agentic commerce community, while making fantastic progress from both a platform and go-to-market standpoint,” said Bob Hower, Partner at G20 Ventures. “We’re thrilled to continue on this journey, now with this fantastic group of investors behind us.”

“ReFiBuy is innovating at a pace that is rare at this stage, and they are doing it with a team whose commerce operator background shows up in every product decision,” said Alex Rosen, Managing Partner of Ridge Ventures. “That combination of technical velocity and deep market understanding is why we wanted to be part of this round.”

“The part of the commerce stack that wins every platform shift is the one closest to product data,” said Sid Mookerji, Managing Partner of Silicon Road Ventures. “ReFiBuy is working at that layer with a team that understands what it takes to operate at catalog scale across thousands of SKUs and hundreds of retail partners.”

ReFiBuy calls its approach Agentic Commerce Optimization, or ACO. The idea is simple. If AI agents are becoming the new gatekeepers of discovery, then product data needs to be structured for how those systems think. That includes how they interpret intent, compare alternatives, and decide what to recommend.

The company sees this as a long-term shift, not a temporary adjustment. As AI assistants take on a bigger role in shopping, the battle for visibility moves away from search rankings and into the data layer that feeds these systems.

For brands, that changes the rules of the game.