When Justin Kosmides co-founded Bloom in 2023, his aim was to serve as a lifeline for the mobility sector. He had watched numerous e-bike and e-scooter ventures collapse due to an inability — or reluctance — to outsource their toughest challenges, such as logistics, production, or supply chain development. His plan was to persuade surviving firms and newcomers to hand off that burden to Bloom.
Then Donald Trump won re-election and began imposing tariffs across dozens of nations, partly to revive domestic manufacturing. This sped up a hardware boom already underway in the U.S., and suddenly it wasn’t just mobility companies seeking to strengthen their local supply chains. Robotics startups, drone builders, and many others began emerging.
That shift created an opening for Bloom, headquartered in Detroit, but seizing it required a partial reinvention. Rather than handling those difficult behind-the-scenes tasks — a core piece of the original strategy — Bloom pivoted to a pure marketplace model that connects buyers with sellers.
It now concentrates on building AI-driven supply chain agents that customers use to locate specific suppliers, components, or manufacturing and engineering services.
The pivot delayed Bloom’s fundraising timeline. Yet the company has already facilitated over 2,000 matches for more than 140 businesses and wants to accelerate growth. In an interview earlier this year, Kosmides, Bloom’s CEO, described his startup as an AI-powered version of what Alibaba did in China: creating a marketplace for contract manufacturers.
Investors are now coming aboard. On Wednesday, Bloom announced a $3.6 million seed round led by SNAK Venture Partners, a firm specializing in marketplace investments. Also participating were Flyover Capital (an early-stage backer focused on flyover states) and deep-tech investor Mana Ventures. Local supporters include Detroit Venture Partners, Invest Detroit Ventures, and the Michigan Outdoor Innovation Fund.
Kosmides, sounding relieved, said in the interview 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, during the early stages of this reinvention. So early, in fact, that the firm passed on 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 stayed in touch with SNAK as it evolved into a more software-centric startup. By May of this year, Bloom had generated in five months as much revenue as it did in all of 2024. SNAK also noted that platform memberships 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 environment has been unforgiving for startups like Bloom. Demonstrating value to investors in a world where leading AI models keep improving can be an uphill fight.
“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 attract other term sheets, Kosmides said. But SNAK, 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 serves both sides of a supplier relationship. Some customers post contract opportunities, while others bid on them. Bloom manages quoting, booking, and payment on its platform, and now helps match companies with suppliers capable of 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 central to Bloom’s reinvention, and it required ingesting extensive data about each provider on the platform. Much of that was public — how a company describes itself on its website, for instance.
But roughly 30-40% comes directly from the companies themselves, Kosmides said. Add the data generated as the startup onboards more customers and makes more matches, and you have Bloom’s competitive 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 approach creates better supplier relationships and makes it easier for startups to launch. He also thinks Bloom’s platform will unlock opportunities for small manufacturers lacking big marketing budgets or sales teams.
He cited a Michigan-based contract manufacturer that, before working with Bloom, took on odd jobs like refurbishing Nest thermostats and Bird scooters, or handling 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.”