AI-Powered Content Commerce Platform Swirl Raises $1.1 Million in Seed Funding Round

• ByStartupStory     |    February 7, 2024

Artificial intelligence-backed content commerce platform Swirl has secured $1.1 million (around INR 9.1 crore) in a seed funding round led by Shastra VC, with participation from angel investors across India, the Middle East, and the US. The company plans to use the fresh capital to expand its product teams, with a focus on the US and the Middle East markets.

Founded in 2021 by Kaizad Hansotia and Bheshaj Joshi, Swirl is a video commerce platform that transforms short videos or live streams into shoppable content. Hansotia stated, “We have already built a strong validation with global brands across India, the Middle East, and Europe. With the funding, we plan to enter the $100 billion+ US and UAE market while strengthening our product suite.”

Swirl has partnered with brands including Puma, VIVO, TVS, Arvind, Momstore, Homesrus, Gkhair, and LG, among others, with use cases spanning D2C, retail, auto, fintech, and several other major consumer categories. The platform is working on an AI tool to extract contextual insights from videos at scale, aiming to enhance user engagement with more personalized and relevant video content.

“By harnessing the power of AI using video context metadata and LLM, Swirl will be able to drive quantifiable sales uplift, creating a seamless and personalized customer experience that is 10X better than what a user sees today,” said Joshi. Swirl also plans to explore the potential of video context metadata to refine and train a large language model (LLM)-based chatbot that can be accessed from within the video itself being watched by the user.

The funding announcement comes just a day after Swirl’s rival Wishlink secured $7 million in a Series A funding.

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