Maju Kuruvilla | Founder and CEO | Spangle
Maju Kuruvilla is the founder and CEO of Spangle, an AI-native commerce intelligence platform built for enterprise retail. His career has been guided by one central question: how do organizations keep making better decisions as the world around them grows more complex. That question has carried him from healthcare technology to nearly eight years at Amazon, and now to building his own company. At EliteX, we are proud to have Maju Kuruvilla as part of the edition: The 5 Most Admired Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2026.
Early in his career, Maju helped build a healthcare technology company that automated complex decisions between hospitals and insurers. He then spent close to eight years at Amazon, where he served as Vice President of Technology during a period of major transformation for the company. Prime, new business lines, and global expansion were reshaping what customers expected, and Maju had a close view of what it took for a large organization to keep raising the bar. He noticed a pattern that would later shape his own venture. Every improvement made for customers seemed to make the organization behind it more complex. The experience got simpler for the shopper, but delivering that simplicity required far more coordination behind the scenes.
When Maju began working closely with enterprise retailers, he saw the same pattern from a different angle. Customer expectations were shifting faster than most organizations could keep pace with. That realization eventually led him to start Spangle.
Start with an observation, not an idea. Ideas change. Observations endure.
The idea for Spangle began with a simple observation made by an ecommerce leader in one of Maju’s early customer meetings: everyone owns optimization, but nobody owns the whole customer experience. Most retail organizations were optimized in separate pieces, with merchandising, search, product content, and advertising each improving on their own. But customers do not experience a business in fragments. They experience one brand. At the same time, product discovery was shifting toward AI, and shoppers were searching for outcomes rather than specific products. Maju saw that AI was not creating these changes but accelerating them, and that the more discovery expanded across channels, the more costly organizational fragmentation would become.
Spangle was built around this insight. Rather than creating another AI tool, Maju set out to help retailers adapt to a new era of product discovery without fragmenting the customer experience. The mission of the company is to help enterprise retailers continuously improve how customers discover and buy products, by learning from every interaction and using that learning to improve the next decision. Over the long term, Maju wants retailers to operate commerce as one connected loop instead of a collection of disconnected tools.
What sets Spangle apart, in Maju’s view, is that generic AI understands the internet, while Spangle is built to understand each retailer’s brand, products, merchandising strategy, and business goals. It functions as a decision system rather than a single-purpose tool. This approach has produced measurable results for clients. After deploying Spangle, REVOLVE saw a 60 percent increase in return on ad spend, Steve Madden achieved a 46 percent lift in add-to-cart rate, and WHP Global doubled its return on ad spend while lifting conversion by 51 percent.
Maju counts the trust of major enterprise retailers among his biggest achievements. Retailers representing more than 4.5 billion dollars in collective annual online sales now rely on Spangle, and every one of them has expanded their use of the platform since their initial deployment. He also points to a more personal achievement: changing his own mind. He originally believed AI itself was the opportunity, until customers convinced him that the real problem was bigger than that. Retailers, he learned, rarely lack ideas. What they lack is the ability to keep pace with how quickly customer behavior changes.
As the AI landscape shifts rapidly, Maju keeps his team focused by asking what problems customers consistently raise, regardless of which technology is making headlines. This discipline keeps Spangle building for lasting customer needs rather than chasing short-lived trends. He spends more time listening to customers than trying to predict where technology is headed, and believes that strong opinions matter, but that reality matters more.
Strong opinions matter. Reality matters more.
Looking ahead, Maju sees 2026 as one of the biggest shifts in commerce since the invention of ecommerce itself, as customers increasingly discover products through AI assistants, search, social platforms, and channels still emerging. He believes the retailers that learn the fastest, rather than those with the most advanced AI, will define the next decade of commerce. His advice to aspiring entrepreneurs reflects the same philosophy that shaped Spangle: start with an observation rather than an idea, since ideas change but genuine observations about how people behave tend to endure. For Maju, leadership itself comes down to a similar discipline, that of changing one’s mind without losing direction, and having the honesty to know when humility should take the place of conviction.
Shopper don’t experience your org chart. They experience one brand.