Kinect × YC

Kinect is an AI shopping assistant layer that plugs into existing e-commerce stores and gives each visitor a personalized selling experience without forcing brands to replatform. The product bundles three surfaces powered by the same catalog and shopper model: a shopping assistant that answers product questions and handles objections in the brand's voice, adaptive product detail pages that reshape copy, imagery, and recommendations based on signals like ad source, search terms, filters, and scroll behavior, and an intelligence dashboard that turns every shopper conversation into structured intent data merchants can act on. It works with Shopify, Shopify Plus, and custom or headless stacks. The launch targets a specific gap the team keeps flagging: the product detail page is one of the last unchanged surfaces in commerce, and while brands have spent years getting sophisticated at driving traffic there, nobody fixed what happens when shoppers arrive . Kinect's pitch is that a static page cannot serve a runner and a gift buyer the same way, so the page itself should change per visitor while also feeding the merchant the kind of qualitative intent data a search bar never captured. The team is also explicit that they are building for human shoppers today and the AI agents that will shop for them tomorrow , which matters as agentic commerce traffic grows. Kinect is a Y Combinator company (Spring 2026 batch) founded by Kratik Agrawal (CEO) and Varun Kandula (CTO), who previously led the conversational intelligence team at CRM startup Reevo, where they built systems for extracting intent from sales dialogue. Kandula also brings commerce infrastructure experience from MongoDB and consulting work with retailers including Sephora and Ralph Lauren. The company is based in San Francisco and goes to market with a white-glove onboarding model rather than a self-serve dashboard, positioning itself for mid-market and enterprise DTC brands that want conversion lift without rebuilding their storefront.