Bloom raises $3.6M to become the ‘Alibaba’ of American manufacturing

When Justin Kosmides co-founded Bloom in 2023, his goal was to create a savior for the mobility industry. He had seen many e-bike and e-scooter companies fail because of an inability — or an unwillingness — to outsource some of the hardest problems, like logistics, manufacturing, or building a supply chain. He wanted to convince survivors and new entrants to let Bloom handle that work for them.

Then Donald Trump got re-elected and started shotgun-blasting tariffs on dozens of countries, partially to jump-start U.S. manufacturing. This accelerated a hardware scene that was already heating up in this country and, suddenly, it was more than just mobility companies looking to beef up their domestic supply chain. Robotics startups, drone-makers, and many more started to pop up.

That was an opportunity for Bloom, which is based in Detroit, but to tackle it, the startup had to partially reinvent itself. Instead of performing some of those harder, behind-the-scenes tasks, which was a big part of the original plan, Bloom shifted to a pure marketplace model, in which it connects buyers and sellers. It’s now focused on making, essentially, supply chain AI agents that Bloom’s customers use to find specific types of suppliers, parts, or manufacturing and engineering services.

The reinvention slowed Bloom’s fundraising plans. But the company has now made over 2,000 matches for more than 140 companies, and it wants to grow faster. In an interview earlier this year, Kosmides, who is Bloom’s CEO, said his startup is like what an AI-driven version of Alibaba did in China, where it created a marketplace for contract manufacturers.

Investors are finally buying in. On Wednesday, Bloom announced a $3.6 million seed round led by SNAK Venture Partners, a marketplace-focused investment firm. Also joining were Flyover Capital (an early-stage investor that focuses on flyover states), and deep tech firm Mana Ventures. Local backers include Detroit Venture Partners, Invest Detroit Ventures, and the Michigan Outdoor Innovation Fund.

Kosmides, sounding relieved, said in the interview that he’s “excited to be done with fundraising and get back to building.”

No, then yes

SNAK first met with Bloom in April of last year, in the early stages of this reinvention. So early, in fact, that the firm passed on the chance to invest in the startup’s pre-seed round.

“We liked the founder and the thesis and passed anyway: we wanted to see more traction,” the firm wrote in a blog post. “We said so plainly and kept tracking the company.”

Bloom kept in touch with SNAK as it worked through becoming a more software-focused startup. By May of this year, Bloom had made as much revenue in five months as it did in all of 2025. SNAK also said the number of memberships on its platform had grown fivefold “with low churn,” meaning few customers were canceling.

“This is meant to reiterate that for us, a pass on pre-seed is not always a pass forever. We are fortunate to have a super focused thesis that allows us to track a small set of interesting early stage companies and build a relationship over time,” the firm wrote.

Kosmides said the fundraising scene has been a bit ruthless for startups like Bloom. Proving your value to investors in a world where the leading AI models keep improving can be an uphill battle.

“To find investors to actually write a term sheet, not follow one, is getting harder and harder,” he said. “That’s just this new era that we’re in, with everyone trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not, what to invest in.”

Bloom did court other term sheets, Kosmides said. But SNAK, which was founded by longtime retail executive Sonia Nagar, is “who you want in your camp” to “build a hopefully category-defining marketplace for mobility, and drones, and all this hardware.”

Matchmaking and discovery

Bloom’s platform handles both sides of a supplier relationship. Some customers use the platform to post contract opportunities, while others use it to bid on those opportunities. Bloom handles quoting, booking, and payment all on its platform, and it now helps match companies with suppliers that can do contract manufacturing, assembly, design and engineering, freight, warehousing, repairs, and even hazardous-materials shipping.

“Our friends at the parts marketplaces like Fictiv, Xometry, MacroFab, and others are really good yesteryear marketplaces for finding one particular part,” Kosmides said. “But when you’re XYZ Drone Company, or an electric motorcycle company, and you need to find a provider that meets all these requirements, have them all bid on this opportunity, that’s a lot more complicated than finding a CNC part.”

Making this system work well is a big part of Bloom’s reinvention, and it involved ingesting a lot of data about each provider on the platform. A lot of that was public data — how a company describes itself on its website, for instance. But around 30-40% of that data is coming directly from the companies, Kosmides said. Add in the data being generated as the startup onboards more customers and makes more matches, and you have Bloom’s edge, he said.

“You can build the craziest model for scraping data but you would never get to that accuracy,” he said. “We started with manually booking services, and then built in layers and pieces and understanding as we built up the provider network, as we built out more and more transactions, and so it’s only getting better and better.”

Kosmides believes this is all a better way to strike up supplier relationships, and that it also makes it easier for startups to get off the ground. But he also thinks Bloom’s platform will help create opportunities for small manufacturers who may not have big marketing budgets or sales teams.

He gave an example of one Michigan-based contract manufacturer that, until it started working with Bloom, was taking on odd jobs like refurbishing Nest thermostats and Bird scooters, or working with Chick-fil-A displays. That same company is now bidding on drone assembly contracts.

“The ability to discover, and the ability to do matchmaking, that is what I think is truly missing” from U.S. manufacturing, he said. “That just doesn’t exist electronically.”