Poltio raises $1M seed round to scale AI-powered shopping assistants
What's the deal? PoltioDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a Turkish startup building AI-powered shopping assistants for e-commerce, has closed a $1M seed round. Rota Portföy Teknoloji GSYF and Inveo VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → co-led the round, with participation from InMerge VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Mentor's Fund, and BFV Yatırımları.
The company's platform guides online shoppers to the right product through interactive questions in real time — a technique known as guided selling. It delivers personalised product recommendations while collecting first-party data for brands, boosting both conversion rates and average order values.
Why now? Poltio's 2025 usage numbers suggest it has hit a growth inflection point. Its infrastructure is active in 23 countries and 12 languages, with over 27 million questions answered, 6.5 million sessions, and 5.5 million unique users engaging with the platform this year alone.
The startup reports conversion rate increases of 108% in personal care and cosmetics and 51% in consumer electronics, with an average 21% lift in basket size. As AI-powered shopping assistants become mainstream in e-commerce, Poltio sees a window to cement its position — particularly in the white goods vertical, where it already works with global brands.
What could go wrong? Guided selling is an increasingly crowded space, with larger e-commerce platforms and AI companies building similar recommendation capabilities in-house. A $1M seed is modest for a startup with global ambitions across multiple verticals and geographies.
Scaling across 23 countries also brings complexity in localisation, compliance, and go-to-market — challenges that can quickly consume a lean budget.
The signal: Poltio remains classified as early stage on Dealroom despite operating across 23 countries, underscoring how capital-light its guided selling model has been relative to its geographic footprint. The investor syndicate — mixing a Turkish technology-focused fund (Rota Portföy Teknoloji GSYF) with cross-border players like Inveo Ventures and INMerge Ventures — mirrors a pattern of Turkish startups assembling hybrid local-international cap tables to support expansion beyond their home market.
Read more: egirisim.com
