There's a certain irony in retail's latest existential question: What good is a product catalog if an AI agent can't read it properly?
That's the premise behind ReFiBuy, a Raleigh startup founded by e-commerce veteran Scot Wingo, which just closed a $13.6 million seed round—oversubscribed, naturally—to help retailers prepare their product data for a world where ChatGPT and Google Gemini might be doing the shopping. The funding, announced May 5, 2026, was led by NewRoad Capital Partners, with Ridge Ventures, Silicon Road Ventures, Incubate Fund, and VELA Partners coming in alongside returning backers G20 Ventures, Commerce Ventures, and Knoll Ventures. A cluster of retail industry angels rounded out the round, which opened in March and wrapped two months later.
The company operates in what it's calling "Agentic Commerce Optimization"—a phrase that sounds like consultant-speak but describes something increasingly real: the business of making sure your running shoes or lipstick shades show up correctly when a consumer asks an AI to recommend something. It's infrastructure for a moment when the storefront might not be a website at all, but a conversation.
The catalog problem, revised
ReFiBuy's Commerce Intelligence Engine—launched on September 16, 2025—does what its name suggests: it evaluates how AI agents interpret product SKUs, enriches the underlying catalog data, then distributes and monitors performance across AI shopping platforms. Think of it as SEO for the chatbot age, with a closed-loop workflow that ingests product information, runs it through an evaluation layer, enriches what's missing or unclear, syncs it to AI engines, and tracks what happens next.
On March 24, the company cracked open access to developers through an API, an MCP server, and a command-line interface. Early design partnerships are in the works with Akeneo, Salsify, Shopify, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud—names that collectively touch a sizable chunk of the e-commerce infrastructure stack. The company serves brands across beauty, fashion, electronics, CPG, and home goods, though it's been selective about naming customers publicly. A Steve Madden executive offered a testimonial when the platform launched last fall, but beyond that, the client roster remains largely under wraps.
Wingo, for his part, isn't new to the e-commerce trenches. He co-founded ChannelAdvisor, which went public in May 2013 and was later acquired by CommerceHub—now known as Rithum—in 2022. He also co-hosts The Jason & Scot Show, a well-traveled podcast in e-commerce circles, and serves as a general partner at Triangle Tweener Fund. ReFiBuy raised a $1.7 million pre-seed last March, also oversubscribed, led by G20 Ventures. As of early May, the company had around 20 employees, with plans to add roughly 10 more in the coming months, according to Axios Raleigh.
The bet embedded in the pitch
The seed capital will fund what most seed capital funds: scaling the product, accelerating go-to-market, running a design partner program for the developer platform. Early access is slated for the third quarter of this year.
But the real question is timing. A December 2025 analysis from Bain projected that agentic commerce—purchases influenced or completed by AI agents—could account for $300 billion to $500 billion in U.S. sales by 2030. That's somewhere between 15% and 25% of online retail. The same report suggested that 30% to 45% of U.S. consumers were already using generative AI for product research and comparison, a figure that feels both plausible and hard to verify with precision. Google has been pushing agentic shopping tools tied to new commerce protocols. Mastercard moved in January to establish standards for AI-driven checkout, a sign that the plumbing is being laid even if the house isn't finished.
Whether ReFiBuy becomes critical infrastructure or a footnote will hinge on how quickly—and how seriously—retailers decide that optimizing for AI agents is worth the investment. Catalog hygiene has always mattered in e-commerce, but it's historically been a back-office function, not a competitive edge. If Wingo is right, that's changing.
Perhaps faster than the retailers themselves expect.
