They found us by word of mouth, through the startup community. In early 2022, an AI company of four people came looking for a vice president of engineering. The work had begun in 2015 as an R&D lab under a different name, building large language models into websites years before the rest of the world had language for what that meant. When the technology became concrete enough to be a product, it took a new name and turned toward commerce: an AI co-pilot that lives inside an online store, learning what a shopper knows and what they'd want to know next. We ran the search and placed the vice president. Alongside it, we placed a principal engineer.
Hiring by survival
A company that size doesn't hire by department. It hires by survival, one critical seat at a time — and over the following years, most of those seats were ours to fill. Software engineers came next, in 2023.
The product started working
And then the product started working. In A/B testing across tens of thousands of shopping sessions, the co-pilot lifted store revenue by an average of forty percent. In the last sixty days of 2023, more than fifteen hundred stores signed up. The four-person company suddenly had demand to meet.
- 4People in the company at the start
- +40%Average revenue lift in A/B testing
- 1,500+Stores signed up in sixty days
The hiring widened
The hiring widened with it. A marketing leadership search that winter. And a product leadership role we worked through with the founder for the better part of a year and a half — the job changed shape three times on paper, from product delivery to product-led growth, before it was right — filled in 2025 from our own network of prior candidates, not from any posting.
Outgrew the searches
Somewhere along the way, the relationship outgrew the searches. We became friends. We brought the company a customer of its own — help no search agreement calls for. And when the team traveled to New York for its industry convention, we went along: to help the team, and to know the whole team, not just the org chart.
Twelve to fifteen people
Today, the company has grown to roughly twelve to fifteen people, is growing rapidly, and is preparing to raise its next round. The product working changed its trajectory, and the key hires who made it work came through us — from product to engineering. The segment they are building in has a name now: agentic commerce, where a buyer's own AI and a seller's AI deal with each other directly, with no platform in the middle. Its rules are being written in the open — a commons, a shared standard, a foundation to steward them — and this company's founder is one of the people writing them.
That is what "the majority of the company" means at seed stage. When a company starts with four people, the vice president of engineering, the principal engineer, the engineers, and the vice president of product are not a sample of the company. They are the core the rest of the company grows around.
They are the core the rest of the company grows around.