Meet Nudge: The Startup Building the Infrastructure

Kanishka Thakur and Gaurav Rawat, who co-founded Nudge in 2023, came to the problem through an unlikely route.

Before Nudge, Thakur was a competitive esports gamer who had built Klutchh, an esports fantasy platform for games like Counter-Strike, PUBG, and Free Fire. The platform scaled quickly to nearly 50,000 users within months, giving the founders early proof that they could build software people genuinely wanted to use.

But the business model never caught up. Esports fantasy is too niche, and engaged users turned out to be largely unwilling to pay despite their enthusiasm. The venture did not survive, but it left the founders with a sharp understanding of community-driven product development.

"We had people constantly active on our Discord servers and heavily using the product. That is when we realised we genuinely liked building products that communities cared about," Thakur says.

Nudge began in 2023 as an ecommerce personalisation platform, helping brands customise shopping experiences for different users. Then generative AI changed everything.

As conversational interfaces became the first place people looked for answers, Thakur and Rawat saw that the problem had shifted. It was no longer just about what happened on a brand's website. It was about how the brand was represented on AI platforms before the shopper ever arrived.

Most tools in the AI visibility space tell brands what people are asking about them on chatbots: which prompts surface their products, which themes are trending, which competitors are being recommended instead.

Nudge goes a step further. It focuses on what it calls the action layer: once a shopper clicks through from an AI recommendation, the shopping experience itself adapts to match the original intent behind the conversation.

If someone asked ChatGPT for comfortable running shoes under Rs 5,000 with quick delivery, and clicked through to a brand's website, Nudge dynamically adjusts the page they land on. Product descriptions change. Specific reviews get surfaced. Bundles are highlighted. Recommendations shift to align with the intent of the original AI conversation rather than presenting a generic homepage.

The platform also works on the discovery side, continuously enriching ecommerce catalogues by updating product schemas, metadata, attributes, and structured information based on how consumers discuss products across AI platforms. This makes brands more understandable and discoverable inside AI systems, and more likely to be recommended when a relevant prompt is entered.

Nudge primarily works with ecommerce businesses on Shopify and Salesforce Commerce Cloud, with clients spanning apparel, beauty, fashion, food, health, and lifestyle. It differentiates itself from broader visibility tools by focusing specifically on commerce workflows rather than generic AI visibility.

At the centre of Nudge's platform is an autonomous experimentation capability that goes well beyond traditional A/B testing.

Conventional ecommerce optimisation works by comparing two versions of a page, identifying the better performer, and rolling it out. Nudge creates multiple variants simultaneously, monitors performance continuously, retires underperforming versions automatically, and generates new alternatives in real time.

The result is a product experience that improves itself based on user behaviour and conversational shopping intent without requiring manual intervention.

"What is happening is, at all times, you have multiple kinds of personalised product pages running continuously," Thakur explains.

Under the hood, the platform uses Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini models across different workflows depending on the use case.

Nudge has more than 25 paying customers, with the largest share of revenue coming from US-based brands. India remains a smaller but growing market. Clients include L'Oreal, Nykaa, and BigBasket. The startup operates on a subscription model with pricing tied to the volume of agentic commerce opportunities processed through the platform rather than individual features.

In a recent pre-seed round, the startup raised $1.1 Mn from s16vc, with participation from operators at Shopify, Nutanix, and Postman.

Looking ahead, Nudge plans to expand into AI-driven advertising workflows and post-click purchase journeys, and is in discussions with larger enterprise retail players operating across both ecommerce and offline retail.

For Thakur, the long-term opportunity goes well beyond helping brands appear in AI-generated recommendations.

"The search part becomes table stakes. The bigger opportunity is controlling the actual commerce experience from discovery to purchase," he says.