$7M pre-seed, led by Lightspeed

Dalet Labs has come out of stealth with $7 million in pre-seed funding and a shopping app called Scene, where you scroll through AI-generated images and buy the products in them. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with SV Angel and a group of angel investors joining.

Shopping without a search bar

The team comes from Google, Runway and MIT, and you can see that background in how the app works. Scene builds a personalised feed of images showing real products, anything from clothes to furniture. You tap something you like, add items from different brands to one basket, and pay without leaving the app.

The thinking behind it is that AI should show you things before you know what you’re looking for. Chatbots and shopping agents can’t do much until you tell them what you want, and Scene is trying to work the other way round.

Early days

For now, the business runs on affiliate commissions. It already features hundreds of brands and plans to grow through influencers, social media and a holiday coupon push. The app is invite-only on the US App Store.

CEO Omer Bar-Tal, who previously worked at Runway, announced the round by saying the team had “raised a $7M pre-seed to make shopping fun again”.

What It Means for Marketing

Most of the conversation around AI shopping has focused on agents that go off and buy things for you. Scene is closer to window shopping, with AI creating the shop window. If it works, product imagery stops being something a brand fully controls, because the app will generate its own scenes around your products. Brands will want their product data to be clean enough that what shows up in those images is accurate.