Detroit-based startup Bloom raises funding to scale its AI-driven marketplace for American manufacturing. The company, co-founded in 2023 by Justin Kosmides, Hitesh Chudasama, and Chris Nolte, wants to become the “Alibaba” of US manufacturing by connecting hardware companies with domestic suppliers.
The $3.6 million seed round was led by SNAK Venture Partners, a marketplace-focused investment firm founded by longtime retail executive Sonia Nagar. Flyover Capital, Mana Ventures, Detroit Venture Partners, Invest Detroit Ventures, and the Michigan Outdoor Innovation Fund also participated.
From Mobility Savior to Supply Chain AI
When Kosmides co-founded Bloom, his goal was to create a savior for the mobility industry. He had watched many e-bike and e-scooter companies fail because they could not — or would not — outsource hard problems like logistics, manufacturing, and supply chain building. He wanted survivors and new entrants to let Bloom handle that work.
Then Donald Trump was re-elected and began imposing tariffs on dozens of countries, partly to jump-start US manufacturing. That accelerated an already heating hardware scene. Suddenly, it was not just mobility companies looking to strengthen their domestic supply chains. Robotics startups, drone-makers, and many others started to appear.
That shift was an opportunity for Bloom, but it forced a partial reinvention. Instead of performing behind-the-scenes tasks, which was a big part of the original plan, Bloom moved to a pure marketplace model connecting buyers and sellers. It now focuses on building supply chain AI agents that customers use to find specific suppliers, parts, or manufacturing and engineering services.
Traction and Growing Pains
The reinvention slowed Bloom’s fundraising plans. But the company has now made over 2,000 matches for more than 140 companies, and it wants to grow faster. Kosmides, Bloom’s CEO, said in an interview earlier this year that his startup is like an AI-driven version of what Alibaba did in China, where it created a marketplace for contract manufacturers.
Investors are finally buying in. On Wednesday, Bloom announced its $3.6 million seed round. Kosmides, sounding relieved, said he is “excited to be done with fundraising and get back to building.”
SNAK first met with Bloom in April of last year, during the early stages of the reinvention. The firm passed on the pre-seed round.
“We liked the founder and the thesis and passed anyway: we wanted to see more traction,” SNAK wrote in a blog post. “We said so plainly and kept tracking the company.”
Bloom kept in touch as it became more software-focused. By May of this year, Bloom had made as much revenue in five months as it did in all of 2025. SNAK also said memberships on its platform had grown fivefold “with low churn,” meaning few customers were canceling.
“This is meant to reiterate that for us, a pass on pre-seed is not always a pass forever,” the firm wrote. “We are fortunate to have a super focused thesis that allows us to track a small set of interesting early stage companies and build a relationship over time.”
Kosmides said the fundraising scene has been ruthless for startups like Bloom. Proving your value to investors while leading AI models keep improving can be an uphill battle.
“To find investors to actually write a term sheet, not follow one, is getting harder and harder,” he said. “That’s just this new era that we’re in, with everyone trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not, what to invest in.”
Bloom did court other term sheets, Kosmides said. But SNAK, he added, is “who you want in your camp” to “build a hopefully category-defining marketplace for mobility, and drones, and all this hardware.”
How the Marketplace Works
Bloom’s platform handles both sides of a supplier relationship. Some customers post contract opportunities, while others bid on them. Bloom handles quoting, booking, and payment on its platform. It now helps match companies with suppliers for contract manufacturing, assembly, design and engineering, freight, warehousing, repairs, and even hazardous-materials shipping.
“Our friends at the parts marketplaces like Fictiv, Xometry, MacroFab, and others are really good yesteryear marketplaces for finding one particular part,” Kosmides said. “But when you’re XYZ Drone Company, or an electric motorcycle company, and you need to find a provider that meets all these requirements, have them all bid on this opportunity, that’s a lot more complicated than finding a CNC part.”
Making this system work well is a big part of Bloom’s reinvention. It involved ingesting a lot of data about each provider on the platform. Much of that was public data — how a company describes itself on its website, for instance. But around 30-40% of that data comes directly from the companies, Kosmides said. Add in data generated as the startup onboards more customers and makes more matches, and you have Bloom’s edge.
“You can build the craziest model for scraping data but you would never get to that accuracy,” he said. “We started with manually booking services, and then built in layers and pieces and understanding as we built up the provider network, as we built out more and more transactions, and so it’s only getting better and better.”
Why Discovery Matters for US Manufacturing
Kosmides believes this is a better way to strike up supplier relationships, and that it makes it easier for startups to get off the ground. He also thinks Bloom’s platform will help create opportunities for small manufacturers who may not have big marketing budgets or sales teams.
He gave an example of a Michigan-based contract manufacturer that, until it started working with Bloom, was taking on odd jobs like refurbishing Nest thermostats and Bird scooters, or working with Chick-fil-A displays. That same company is now bidding on drone assembly contracts.
“The ability to discover, and the ability to do matchmaking, that is what I think is truly missing” from US manufacturing, he said. “That just doesn’t exist electronically.”
With fresh capital and growing traction, Bloom raises funding to bet that supply chain AI can do for American hardware what Alibaba did for Chinese manufacturing.
