ReFiBuy raises $13.6M to make product catalogues AI-agent ready
What's the deal? ReFiBuy, a startup building what it calls an "Agentic Commerce Optimisation" platform, has raised $13.6M in an oversubscribed seed round led by NewRoad Capital Partners. Ridge Ventures, Silicon Road Ventures, Incubate Fund, and VELA Partners joined as new investors, alongside existing backers G20 Ventures, Commerce Ventures, and Knoll Ventures.
The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company helps brands and retailers optimise their product catalogues so AI shopping agents can better interpret, recommend, and surface their products. The capital will go toward scaling its Commerce Intelligence Engine and accelerating go-to-market efforts.
Why now? AI shopping agents are fast becoming a new way consumers discover and buy products. Bain & Company projects agentic commerce could reach $300B to $500B in US sales by 2030 — representing 15% to 25% of total online retail.
The problem: most product catalogues were built for human browsing and keyword-driven search, not for how AI agents parse and rank products. As traffic from traditional search declines, brands face a double bind — a new discovery channel is rising while the old one erodes.
ReFiBuy's platform evaluates how shopping agents interpret each SKU, generates expanded product context for conversational discovery, enriches catalogues with optimised data, syncs updates across commerce endpoints, and monitors performance over time.
"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, chief executive officer and co-founder of ReFiBuy.
What could go wrong? Agentic commerce is still nascent. The Bain projections are ambitious, and how quickly consumers actually shift purchasing behaviour toward AI agents remains uncertain. ReFiBuy is also entering a space where larger players — from e-commerce platforms to search giants — could build competing optimisation tools as the market matures.
There's also an inherent chicken-and-egg challenge: brands need to invest in catalogue optimisation before agentic commerce reaches scale, betting that the payoff will come.
The signal: Product data is becoming critical infrastructure in commerce. Just as SEO spawned an entire industry around making content visible to search engines, agentic commerce optimisation could create a parallel ecosystem for AI-driven discovery.
"Product data is becoming the most important infrastructure layer in commerce, and ReFiBuy is building it," said Stefan Sterns, partner at NewRoad Capital Partners.
The oversubscribed round suggests investors see this shift as inevitable, even if the timeline is uncertain. For brands and retailers, the message is clear: optimise for AI agents now or risk invisibility in the next era of online shopping.
Read more: pr-inside.com
