Exclusive: Marc Lore and Melissa Bridgeford’s Wizard emerges from stealth

Launched publicly on Feb. 11, the New York–based startup is betting that the next wave of online retail will be driven not by bigger marketplaces, but by agents that do the work of searching, comparing, and checking out on behalf of consumers.

“The online shopping experience today is highly fragmented, and consumers are searching across multiple tabs, multiple websites, multiple social platforms to find and buy what they’re looking for,” Bridgeford told Fortune. “Wizard is simplifying that entire process by doing the work for you. We’re essentially generating the best product recommendations from across the web”

The platform’s launch has been a long time coming: Wizard raised a $50 million Series A in 2021 led by NEA, with participation from Accel and Lore, who also serves as cofounder and chairman. Lorex—best known for founding Jet.com and selling it to Walmart—where he later ran U.S. ecommerce, brings heavyweight credibility in online retail. Bridgeford, a Harvard Business School alum, previously founded Stylust, a conversational commerce startup that Wizard acquired and used as the foundation for its technology and team.​ 

Initially, Wizard focused on a B2B conversational commerce model, helping brands and retailers convert shoppers via text-driven interactions. Over the past few years, as generative AI tools took off and consumer behavior shifted, the company quietly pivoted toward a consumer-first agent and ran a private beta to test engagement and conversion. Wizard declined comment on its recent finances. 

Wizard’s model aims to cut through what Bridgeford calls an “all‑time high” in ecommerce friction, namely an abundance of options that carry measurable financial consequences for retailers. A 2024 Accenture survey found that 74% of the survey’s 19,000 respondents said that they had abandoned an online shopping cart at least once in the past three months because they felt “bombarded by content, overwhelmed by choice and frustrated by the amount of effort they need to put in to making decisions.” 

Wizard’s answer, according to Bridgeford, is in-depth curation and end-to-end flow. Wizard searches across websites, customer reviews, and trusted editorial and social content to return a tightly curated set of products—often a top five—rather than thousands of results. To fully close the loop on transactions, Wizard also consolidated the search and checkout processes into a single process. 

The public launch is combined with a partnership with Best Buy where the company is debuting its native checkout feature. The electronics giant represents one of the largest categories in e-commerce, generating $33 billion in revenue in the U.S. last year and demonstrating consistent year-over-year growth. 

While electronics is the first test case for Wizard, Bridgeford says the company has upcoming launches with retailers in other product categories including apparel (the largest e-commerce market in the U.S.), and beauty. 

On the business side, the company’s initial business model includes a combination of take rates and affiliate revenue, but Wizard declined to comment further. However, Bridgford said that Wizard is setting itself apart from ad-driven marketplaces by not selling sponsored placements. Bridgeford argues that consumers have been “really drowned by sponsored product recommendations,” which she believes have crowded out organic results. 

 Longer term, the company wants to build highly personalized “Wizards” for each user that knows their favorite brands, budget, and even details like their dog’s size.

That vision extends to the structure of online retail itself. Bridgeford talks about “a world without websites,” where consumers increasingly start—and finish—their shopping journeys inside agents like Wizard rather than on retailer homepages. Physical stores, she predicts, will lean further into experiential roles, while agents quietly handle the heavy lifting of search, validation, and checkout.

“We’re still in the early innings,” Bridgeford says, “but AI shopping agents are going to eliminate that fragmented, frustrating experience and really transform how people shop online.”