Kristian Lukauskis is 20, already speaks like a press release, and has apparently found a way to eliminate one of the most mind-numbing jobs in e-commerce: inventory management. If he were any more on-trend, he would be pitching AI-generated matcha.
Along with his co-founder, Alexander Dillon, also 20 and British enough to be taken seriously by the Financial Times, Lukauskis just raised half a million dollars to build what they claim is the first autonomous artificial intelligence agent designed to handle inventory across every major e-commerce platform. Think Amazon, Shopify, Etsy. The chaotic realm of stock counts and price changes, now allegedly conquerable with one clean command: “Make all winter jackets 20 percent off.”
Two Youngsters and a Line of Command
Is it real? Too early to tell. But a lot of people with money think so.
The $500,000 pre-seed round was led by Matador VC, a firm that has recently backed a string of Y-Combinator startups. Angel investors from Amazon Web Services and Google joined in, bringing even more legitimacy to a product that does not technically exist yet. ChatBlu is expected to go live in September, and the faith backing it is already loud.
“We want to make inventory invisible,” Lukauskis says, in the calm, AI-era tone of someone who has been media-trained before ever shipping a product. “It should run in the background. Quietly. Reliably. You should never have to worry about it again.”
Most sellers today operate across multiple storefronts and rely on clunky dashboards, spreadsheets, or overworked freelancers to keep things in sync. Mistakes are constant. The industry loses an estimated $1.8 trillion annually through overstocking, stockouts, and poor forecasting. The founders of ChatBlu are betting that most people do not want to manage inventory. They just want it to go away.
Enter the Agent
The tool they are building is not a dashboard or an assistant. It is an autonomous system that reads your command, understands the context of your store, and acts. It updates prices, manages inventory levels, applies discounts, and keeps your listings consistent without needing human follow-up.
“You just tell it what outcome you want. It figures out how to get there,” says Dillon, who balances his Loughborough education with a gift for saying the right thing at the right time. He is strategic, steady, and has a sharp eye for inefficiency.
Internal testing suggests that once a store connects to the system, conversion rates can improve by up to 20 percent through automated product listing optimization. The idea is not just automation, but optimization, letting the agent learn from patterns and respond in real time.
The Adults in the Room
Sairam Vangapally, the 32-year-old Chief Technology Officer, gives the startup a solid spine. Formerly at Amazon and Shutterfly, he brings deep experience in large-scale infrastructure and machine learning. His presence is not cosmetic. Without him, the idea would still be vapor.
“We wanted this product to be technically sound from day one,” says Dillon. “So we brought on people who had done this before, at scale, inside the kind of companies we hope to disrupt.”
Their team also includes former staffers from Apple, Meta, Adidas, and Xbox. It is not a garage operation. It is more of a student-accelerated strike team, one that knows the story it is trying to write and how to sell it.
School of Sharks
ChatBlu was born inside the Genoa Entrepreneurship School, a European program known for pushing students toward venture capital while graduating. Over 75% of its cohort raise money. The school connected the team to mentors from Sequoia, Apple, and Tesla. It also gave them credibility at the fundraising table. Backed by industry leaders like Douglas Leone, Partner at Sequoia Capital, who serve as mentors to students, Genoa connects founders to a powerful support network without requiring them to pause their education.
“Having raised €1 million at 23 while studying, I know how hard it is to build at a young age. We saw the spark and the right attitude in Lukauskis, and we are proud to support him and those set to impact the world,” says Guglielmo Schenardi, Genoa’s founder.
The narrative is compelling. Two students, a senior engineer, a market crying out for change, and investors eager to be early. There is tension, timing, and enough capital to make a real attempt at reshaping operations.
From Pre-Seed to Prime Time
ChatBlu’s first wave of customers will come from Anglo-Saxon markets. If all goes to plan, expansion into Hispanic e-commerce spaces will follow. Their long-term vision is to become the silent operator behind millions of stores, the infrastructure no one talks about because it just works.
“This is not about replacing people with robots. It is about giving people their time back,” says Lukauskis. “Inventory should be invisible. You should never have to think about it.”
Their belief is that the last great inefficiency in e-commerce is human error. If you can remove that, you unlock something faster, leaner, and more scalable than anything the category has seen.
And if that happens, the age of twenty will not be the most interesting thing about them.
Photo Courtesy of: ChatBlu
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