s16vc and Antler back a platform that connects AI discovery to storefront conversion for commerce brands
NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, June 24, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Nudge, the company building commerce infrastructure for AI shopping, today launched its Agentic Commerce Platform and announced $1.1M in pre-seed funding. Investors include s16vc (a fund backed by the founders of Miro, Datadog and Intercom), Antler and operators from Shopify, Nutanix and Postman. The platform gives commerce brands a single system to measure AI visibility, enrich product catalogs for agent recommendations and convert AI discovery into revenue.
The way people shop is changing. Intent no longer starts in a search bar or a product feed. It starts in chat. Shoppers ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini what to buy, receive a short list of recommended products and either click out to the product page to complete the purchase or check out natively within the chat.
Winning in commerce used to mean winning a human’s attention. Increasingly, humans aren’t the only ones evaluating products and making purchases. AI agents research products, compare options and evaluate brands based on a shopper’s query, intent and use case. They either hand the shopper a recommendation or complete the purchase themselves. For commerce brands, that means selling to two buyers at once: agents analysing information and humans making decisions.
Most platforms in the AI search space address only the visibility layer: measuring how brands appear in AI answers. Nudge goes further. The platform operates across three connected layers:
* AI visibility: Measures how a brand and its products are ranked, recommended and cited across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews.
* Catalog enrichment: Structures the entire product catalog so agents can read it, aligning with emerging commerce protocols like ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) and UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol). It maps schema and conversational attributes, with fixes pushed directly to storefronts such as Shopify, WooCommerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
* Shoppable funnels: Convert shoppers who arrive from AI discovery with experiences that match their intent, within the brand’s existing storefront.
Most tools stop at visibility. By bridging the gap between AI discovery and conversion, Nudge ensures the fastest path to revenue, whether through direct or in-chat shopping.
“Shopping is becoming a conversation. People ask AI platforms what to buy and get an answer back with a list of recommendations to choose from,” said Kanishka Thakur, co-founder and CEO of Nudge. “Every brand needs an ongoing read of how shoppers describe them in AI conversations and which products surface in answers. But the real differentiation is going from search to action: closing the conversion gap between AI discovery and purchase. Being recommended is the start. Being bought is the win.”
Early customers include a leading health and nutrition brand and a large footwear brand, with active deployments across apparel, beauty, wellness and food and beverage. Brands using Nudge have seen up to 4x growth in AI visibility and a 24% lift in orders.
“LLMs are unlocking a new era of personalization, both for humans and for AI agents acting on their behalf. What impressed us most about Kanishka and Gaurav is not just the vision, but the speed at which they learn, iterate and execute. In rapidly evolving markets, founder velocity is often the most important predictor of success.” Aleks Shamis (Co-Founder & Managing Partner, s16vc)
Nudge will use the funding to expand its GTM and engineering teams, deepen integration with commerce-specific agent protocols including ACP and UCP, and advance the AI architecture that powers catalog enrichment and funnel personalization at scale.
Kanishka Thakur and Gaurav Rawat, co-founders of Nudge, started building products right out of college. They previously built Klutchh, an esports platform, and scaled it to 100,000 users, until the deeper problem they kept running into pushed them to pivot: personalizing user experiences at scale. Nudge is built to solve that.
ABOUT NUDGE
Nudge is the agentic commerce platform that helps brands get recommended and purchased across AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Nudge measures AI visibility at the SKU level, enriches catalogs and product pages so AI agents can confidently recommend the right products, and delivers shoppable funnels that convert intent into revenue. Founded by Kanishka Thakur and Gaurav Rawat, Nudge works with commerce brands across apparel, beauty, food & beverage, and wellness. www.nudgenow.com
Sam Brancato
Bospar
PRforNudge@bospar.com
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