Sidd Motwani

Sidd Motwani says he has spent his whole career on one problem: how systems come to understand people from their behavior, he told Pulse 2.0. He built user data systems at Priceline, then led product for Spotify's user representation platform from 2019 to 2023, the layer under Discover Weekly, Home, Search and Radio. He is now co-founder and CEO of Malachyte, which brings that approach to e-commerce.

His late uncle, Dr. Rajeev Motwani, co-created PageRank, Motwani said.

Taking Spotify's User Vector to Retail

At Spotify, Motwani and co-founder Ian Anderson worked on predicting what a user wanted to listen to right now from intent and likely next action, not only listening history, he told AlleyWatch. "My job was ultimately to build a platform around the technology and get the entire Spotify ecosystem to use the underlying user vector," he said on Talk Commerce. Applied to shopping, the same idea addresses new visitors a store has never seen before.

Raising a $10 Million Seed

Malachyte raised $10 million in seed funding co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Gradient Ventures, with Harpoon Ventures participating, Motwani told Pulse 2.0.

The team worked with Stanford University early on, and its third co-founder, Shivaditya Sinha, serves as COO, he told AlleyWatch.