Detroit-based startup Bloom has secured $3.6 million in seed funding to expand its supplier marketplace platform for American hardware manufacturers, according to an announcement made Wednesday. The round was led by SNAK Venture Partners, with participation from Flyover Capital, Mana Ventures, Detroit Venture Partners, Invest Detroit Ventures, and the Michigan Outdoor Innovation Fund. Founded in 2023 by Justin Kosmides, the company has shifted from its original model of handling logistics and manufacturing tasks directly to operating a pure marketplace that connects buyers with suppliers across the domestic hardware industry.
Bloom has completed over 2,000 matches for more than 140 companies since pivoting to its current marketplace approach. By May of this year, the startup had generated as much revenue in five months as it did in all of 2025, while memberships on its platform grew fivefold with low churn rates, meaning few customers were canceling their subscriptions. The company's platform now facilitates connections for contract manufacturing, assembly, design and engineering, freight, warehousing, repairs, and hazardous-materials shipping. Around 30-40% of the data powering Bloom's matching system comes directly from suppliers themselves, with the remainder drawn from public sources like company websites.
Kosmides told TechCrunch his startup resembles "an AI-driven version of Alibaba" that created a marketplace for contract manufacturers in China, but tailored for the U.S. market. He described the current fundraising environment as challenging for startups like Bloom, saying "to find investors to actually write a term sheet, not follow one, is getting harder and harder" as investors struggle to determine what's genuine and what's not in the AI era. SNAK Venture Partners initially passed on Bloom's pre-seed round in April 2025, wanting to see more traction, but continued tracking the company's progress and ultimately led the seed round after observing its growth.
The startup's reinvention was accelerated by shifts in the hardware manufacturing landscape, particularly following Donald Trump's re-election and subsequent tariff policies aimed at jump-starting U.S. manufacturing. What began as a solution for mobility companies like e-bike and e-scooter makers expanded to serve robotics startups, drone manufacturers, and other hardware businesses seeking to strengthen their domestic supply chains. Kosmides believes Bloom's platform addresses a critical gap in American manufacturing: the ability to discover suppliers and make matches electronically, which he says simply doesn't exist currently. He cited one Michigan-based contract manufacturer that previously took odd jobs refurbishing Nest thermostats and Bird scooters or working with Chick-fil-A displays, but is now bidding on drone assembly contracts through Bloom's platform.
The company plans to use the fresh capital to accelerate growth and expand its network of suppliers and customers. Kosmides said he's "excited to be done with fundraising and get back to building" after what he described as a difficult funding process. The platform's edge comes from combining public data, direct supplier input, and transaction data generated as more customers join and more matches are made, creating accuracy that scraping public data alone couldn't achieve. The startup's vision is to make it easier for hardware startups to launch while simultaneously creating opportunities for small manufacturers who lack big marketing budgets or sales teams to compete for contracts they might never have discovered otherwise. For marketplace-focused investors, the bet is that Bloom can become a category-defining platform spanning mobility, drones, and the broader hardware ecosystem now expanding across the United States. The challenge will be maintaining momentum in a funding climate where proving differentiation against rapidly improving AI models grows harder by the quarter, testing whether supplier network effects can outpace commoditization pressures.