Twini co-founders on why AI-curated shopping will change the face—and the finances—of e-commerce

Online shopping is a major part of all our lives these days but how often have you found yourself frustrated at samey websites or scrolling through pages of products looking for the item you actually want? 

Chatbots and AI shop assistants were an attempt to make online shopping more personalized and human but most often they promise more than they can deliver. 

With Twini , shopping becomes a fully-curated experience that’s more pleasurable for customers and drives up conversion rates for the vendor. Win:win.

We spoke to Twini’s founders, Davide Roli and Andrea Vitali , to learn more about how they’re changing the face—and the future—of e-commerce. 

Can you explain what you’re building at Twini? 

Davide: Absolutely! Imagine a world where every online store you visit is designed just for you. Every product description, every page, tailored to your tastes. Now, picture being the e-commerce brand on the other side that knows exactly what to say and how to say it to turn visitors into buyers. With Twini, that's exactly what we're making possible.

With just a brand's URL, we transform static product catalogs into dynamic, personalized experiences. On the same website, what you see differs from what I see—product descriptions, reviews, and images adapt in real time to each visitor.

How did you realize something like this was needed?

Davide: We began by building a consumer-facing AI skincare analysis and diagnostics tool and it was through this that we realized there was a huge opportunity in personalizing the online retail space. 

Brands that really want to innovate are always looking for ways to speak more directly to their customers. Despite the huge amount of innovation e-commerce has seen in the last decade, the customer-facing experience has remained quite stuck in the past. 

Brands still rely on static websites that offer the exact same experience to every visitor. On average, they convert only 1.9%.

AI chatbots promised a solution but in reality they’re still quite clunky, ugly, and rarely used because they’re tucked away in a corner of the screen so it's far from a perfect integrated experience. 

What are your goals for developing that customer base? 

In just the last month since launch, we onboarded 5 paying customers, starting from beauty brands because we have experience in that field through our previous startup. These are all fast-growing brands in Milan, Paris, and New York with revenues between €2 million and €15 million. 

These early adopters operate in industries like beauty, fashion, and home goods, all utilizing Shopify as their e-commerce platform. The plan for the next few months is to raise a pre-seed round in 2025 and to onboard 100 big brands.

Very exciting. How has it been for you on the technical side, Andrea?

Andrea: It's a huge challenge because from a design point of view, we’re innovating in a field that has already been innovating for many years. E-commerce is very optimized. So our challenge is a big one because we need to revolutionize something that has been there forever. 

We're trying to bring AI into e-commerce and to create a comprehensive experience. We've started with product page personalization leveraging LLMs, but that’s just the beginning. From the developer side, these new technologies are now accessible to everyone and are progressively becoming more and more cost-effective on the whole. But that doesn’t mean they’re production-ready. 

We need to adapt and fine-tune our data models for different customers so we need to develop a lot of prompts. We also need to handle dozens of long-running requests per minute coming from our customers’ websites. So it's a challenge in terms of both innovation and the state-of-the-art.

Davide: We are starting with Shopify integrations, so e-commerce stores that run on Shopify. And that means we can potentially reach 5 million Shopify stores and have an easier distribution channel from day one. But as we grow we will integrate other e-commerce platforms to widen our reach.

How have customers and potential customers been responding when you demo Twini? 

Davide: The reaction from brands is extremely positive. They quickly see the value of it because they know that Twini offers a huge opportunity for them to stand out as a brand and drive more sales. Signing customers is always a challenge, however this time it hasn’t been as difficult as we were expecting. If we jump on a call and showcase the demo, around 1 in 3 of them will become our customers. We’ll see if this pattern continues. 

Did you have a specific goal coming into Techstars? 

Davide: Yeah, and we’ve achieved it. The quantitative goal was to finish the program with five paying customers. So now we’ve updated that goal and we want to finish the program with ten paying customers. And we’re going live on the first customer website in two weeks. So that’s the next big milestone. 

Congrats! And then lastly, is there anything that has surprised you so far about the founding journey?

Andrea: I think what has most surprised me in this couple of months is the founder culture right now in Techstars that’s also shared across a lot of founding communities. 

It’s all about sharing. We’ve helped each other a lot. And it’s been so important to showcase what we’ve done with no shame. That’s not always easy in the early stages of product development but everyone is going through the same thing and it’s never judgmental. It’s actually fun and based a lot around connecting and helping. 

So that was the most surprising, pleasing, and exciting thing to find out. 

Love that. Well, best of luck with the rest of Techstars and here’s wishing Twini all the best.