Marqo has announced its Series A funding round, marking an important milestone as the company continues to expand its AI platform for product discovery in ecommerce.

The round, led by Lightspeed with participation from Blackbird VC, January Capital, and Chronosphere co founder Rob Skillington, brings Marqo’s total funding to $17.8 million and supports the company’s continued growth across enterprise ecommerce. Read announcement here

The investment reflects the rapid transformation taking place in how consumers discover products online.

Shopping journeys are increasingly shaped by natural language queries, conversational interfaces, and intelligent systems that help shoppers explore large product catalogs more intuitively. As product assortments expand and digital commerce becomes more competitive, retailers face a growing challenge: helping customers find the right product quickly and confidently.

Marqo was founded to address this problem.

From Vector Search Innovation to AI Product Discovery

Marqo initially gained recognition as one of the leading platforms for AI powered vector search.

Vector search technology made it possible to understand unstructured data such as images, product descriptions, and natural language queries, enabling a new generation of search experiences that move beyond traditional keyword matching.

However, as Marqo began working with ecommerce companies, a larger opportunity became clear.

Retailers were not simply looking for faster search infrastructure. They needed systems capable of understanding shopper intent, interpreting complex product catalogs, and continuously improving discovery based on real customer behavior.

This insight led Marqo to evolve from a vector search platform into a comprehensive AI native product discovery system built specifically for ecommerce.

Today Marqo enables retailers to power search, recommendations, and discovery experiences that adapt dynamically to how customers browse and shop. By training large language models on each retailer’s catalog and learning from behavioral signals such as clicks, add to cart actions, and purchases, the platform aligns product ranking with real demand rather than static keyword rules.

The result is a discovery experience that helps retailers convert high intent traffic more effectively while reducing the need for constant manual merchandising adjustments.

Product Discovery Is Becoming the Core of Ecommerce

The way consumers find products online is changing rapidly.

Traditional ecommerce search was built around keywords and filters. Modern shopping behavior is far more complex. Customers describe products using natural language, explore visually, and expect digital storefronts to understand intent rather than exact phrasing.

At the same time, product discovery is expanding beyond the retailer’s website.

AI assistants, conversational interfaces, and intelligent agents are beginning to influence how shoppers research products, compare options, and make purchasing decisions. Retailers must now think about how their products are interpreted and surfaced by AI systems across multiple discovery surfaces.

This shift is redefining the role of product discovery infrastructure.

Instead of a standalone search engine, discovery is becoming an intelligent layer that understands products, adapts to shopper behavior, and powers multiple experiences across the customer journey.

Marqo’s platform was built to support this new model.

By combining multimodal catalog understanding with real time behavioral learning, Marqo enables retailers to deliver discovery experiences that feel intuitive for shoppers while remaining measurable for businesses.

Retailers gain the ability to surface more relevant products, improve conversion across search driven sessions, and transform discovery into a consistent driver of revenue growth.

Building the Intelligence Layer for Modern Commerce

The Series A funding will support Marqo’s continued expansion across enterprise ecommerce and the development of its AI discovery platform.

As the ecommerce landscape evolves, the ability to understand products and interpret shopper intent will become a defining competitive advantage for retailers.

Marqo’s mission is to provide the intelligence layer that powers that capability.

By turning product catalogs and customer behavior into adaptive discovery systems, Marqo is helping retailers create shopping experiences that feel more natural, more relevant, and ultimately more profitable.