Talk Commerce

Sidd Motwani, co-founder and CEO of Malachyte, on user vectors, personalization before the first click, and bringing Spotify grade recommendation infrastructure to Shopify and Salesforce Commerce brands.

Show Notes

Sidd Motwani, co-founder and CEO of Malachyte, on real-time personalization that starts before the first click. Malachyte builds a user vector, a numerical representation of each shopper's intent and preference, with no third-party cookies, no purchase history, and no sign-in required. Sidd and his co-founder built the user vector platform at Spotify, where it powers most of the application across music, podcasts, and audiobooks.

In this conversation:

  • What a user vector is and why it works cold, with no data about the shopper
  • Personalizing from the referrer, device, time of day, and location before a first click
  • The Spotify story, from one team's technology to the backbone of the app
  • A free pilot for Shopify and Salesforce Commerce brands, with Malachyte doing the heavy lifting
  • His agentic commerce take, agents and humans will both come to the store, and the store itself has to serve them proactively
Chapters

00:00
eTail Boston and the data and AI track
01:19
What Malachyte does
02:04
The Spotify user vector story
02:52
Free pilot and the roadmap
05:02
Agentic commerce and proactivity

Sidd Motwani: LinkedIn
Malachyte: malachyte.com

Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026. To learn more about our at-event interviews, go to talk-commerce.com/events

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Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.

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Isaac Morey (00:00:00)
Actually this was a gift from from this guy right here.

Sidd Motwani (00:00:02)
Nice, that's awesome. ⁓ My castor date without shirts.

Isaac Morey (00:00:05)
The ⁓ that's the brand guide style guide. ⁓

Sidd Motwani (00:00:09)
I saw this mighty Piccrow Homer again last night and like ⁓ 20 games above 500. Yeah. Better than the twin. Better than the twin, that's the ⁓ shaker. Should ⁓ I put this here? ⁓

Isaac Morey (00:00:11)
Yeah, they're and no, they're doing really good. Doing great. ⁓

Isaac Morey (00:00:19)
He's from Minnesota, so this is

Yeah that's that's totally fine. ⁓ Are we rolling? ⁓ Alrighty. ⁓ Well we are here at ETail Boston. Could you start by telling us your name, title and company?

Sidd Motwani (00:00:34)
Yeah, name is Sid Motwani. I'm co-founder and CEO of Malachite. ⁓

Isaac Morey (00:00:38)
Great. Sid, I saw you talking on a panel yesterday. Could you share a little bit with our audience about ⁓ what you covered yesterday? ⁓

Sidd Motwani (00:00:47)
So I was part of a data and AI track. So essentially we got to talk about the transformation around user data. ⁓ It started with insights and analytics. I got to actually moderate a couple panels where we were kind of like going deep into A-B testing methodologies, data-driven decisions, and how you kind of democratize user data across the enterprise and all the brands themselves. ⁓ And then you start to move into personalization as your data gets larger. And so I sat on a panel where we talked about personalization and what we do in Malkite. ⁓

Isaac Morey (00:01:17)
Very cool. ⁓ what do you do about

Sidd Motwani (00:01:19)
Yeah, so we do real-time personalization at scale. So we are specifically a deep tech infrastructure technology company where we generate a profile of a user without any information needed about them, so no third-party cookie, ⁓ user history, signing in required. We do what's called cold activation of a user vector. ⁓ And a user vector is the future of user profiles, and it's a numerical representation of each user's preference and intent, and it can proactively retrieve from a catalog of products and surface.

recommendations that are highly relevant to each and every user's intent right now and overall preference as a whole. ⁓ So that essentially is personalizing for search and PLP, landing pages, PDP, add-to-cart, email, like across the journey. ⁓

Isaac Morey (00:02:04)
And you have your your you have experience working at Spotify? ⁓

Sidd Motwani (00:02:08)
Yeah, yeah, my co-founder and I came from Spotify. ⁓ Well he he's a genius. I I got to be the product lead for the user vector technology itself. ⁓ But ⁓ my job was ultimately to build a platform around the technology and get the entire Spotify ecosystem to use the underlying user vector. And today it powers 90% of the application across music, podcasts, and audiobooks. So yeah. He was there since 2015. I joined in 2019 when we expanded to audio and when we grew into podcasts and audiobooks and then we're competing.

directly with TikTok and YouTube. ⁓

Isaac Morey (00:02:40)
Okay, great. Yeah, I've been hearing a lot at this conference actually about how great the ⁓ the personalization is on that app. So I'm sure that you ⁓ know it was like an educational crash course that leads absolutely Malachi. What's next for you guys? ⁓

Sidd Motwani (00:02:52)
Yeah, I mean for us we actually just announced our company a few days ago. So we're just now coming to market. We were pretty intentional about our early customers, right? So like we knew who we wanted to build for and we got to build for them. ⁓ We got to show the outcomes. And now we built an entire platform suite around the user vector itself. ⁓ We're specifically focused on Shopify and Salesforce brands right now. So like from a commerce cloud perspective, we come in and we custom train and integrate our technology for every brand. We do all the heavy lifting, and right now we're really kind of focused on our free pilot and demonstrating.

the technology ⁓ free of cost so that we can ultimately earn business. ⁓ And our roadmap's rapidly expanding. So we're able to do a handful of things that are novel in the industry right now. ⁓

Some of those include being able to personalize and re-rank off of your refer. So like generally traffic comes to these websites from like Google, TikTok, Meta, Pinterest, right? Like these different these different channels. We're able to use those signals in addition to time of day, day of week, device, and location and immediately personalize before a first click, before anything. And as they're engaging, rapidly learn and improve. So we're really expanding the product suite into like email and then expanding the suite of signals that we're able to consider so the personalization gets even.

better and honestly we're just getting started we're probably not even doing Spotify level sophisticated stuff for like five years so yeah that's kind of where we are and

Isaac Morey (00:04:11)
And that free pilot, is it open to all? What if our cus what if our audience is curious? Where can they look or

Sidd Motwani (00:04:16)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. ⁓ actually they can they can get a free demo and an audit on our website. They just have to put in their email. they're gonna get a personal note from me with a demo that essentially walks through what the technology would like for their current commerce store. So they can already start to kind of preview what the technology can do for them. ⁓ it's a very simple pilot. Again, we do all the heavy lifting. It generally takes one or two meetings just in order to kind of align on the entire process, but ultimately they are to be an extension of the brand's team overall improve the outcomes. So ⁓

Shopify and Salesforce Commerce. our priorities right now. We've done some headlists so we can do custom work, but ⁓ it it just moves way faster and it's way more simple for us to kind of prioritize Shopify and Salesforce initially. So yeah. ⁓

Isaac Morey (00:04:59)
Any final words or hot takes to wrap things up?

Sidd Motwani (00:05:02)
That takes, yeah, mean like I I guess like the big one is just there's so much talk about like agentic commerce, right? ⁓ agents coming to store on behalf of the user, right, and and doing shopping and and honestly our our general stance is like it's probably gonna be some combination of both where yes agents will come into the store but users and humans will come into the store too and I think like the key words that I kind of focus on is number one proactivity, so like proactively being able to surface recommendations for each user. The best way to understand that is TikTok. Like when you open

TikTok, you get a for you page, and they have a billion user generated content and a billion users, and they pick one UGC for each user, the point of them opening the application. So they're proactively picking one out of a billion options for each person, and that's kind of where I believe we're moving into. So like whether it's an agent or a human coming into the store, they need to be served at the store level itself. And so I fundamentally believe that it's gonna be infrastructure technology for each brand that's gonna ultimately be the future of AI moving forward. ⁓

Isaac Morey (00:06:01)
Awesome. Well great talking with you and good luck at the rest of the show.

Sidd Motwani (00:06:04)
Thank you, it's a pleasure. ⁓