Detroit Startup Bloom Raises $3.6M to Build the Alibaba of US Manufacturing

Detroit-based Bloom has raised a $3.6 million seed round to build what its CEO calls an AI-driven version of Alibaba for American manufacturing. SNAK Venture Partners, a marketplace-focused investment firm, led the round, which was announced Wednesday.

Flyover Capital, an early-stage investor focused on flyover states, and deep tech firm Mana Ventures also joined. Local backers included Detroit Venture Partners, Invest Detroit Ventures, and the Michigan Outdoor Innovation Fund.

The company has made more than 2,000 matches for over 140 companies and plans to use the capital to grow faster.

From service provider to pure marketplace

Justin Kosmides co-founded Bloom in 2023 to serve the mobility industry. He had watched e-bike and e-scooter companies fail because they couldn't — or wouldn't — outsource hard problems like logistics, manufacturing, and supply chain building.

Then Donald Trump won re-election and began imposing tariffs on dozens of countries, partly to jump-start U.S. manufacturing. A hardware scene that was already heating up accelerated, and Bloom's potential customer base expanded beyond mobility to robotics startups, drone-makers, and more.

That shift forced Bloom to partially reinvent itself. Instead of performing behind-the-scenes tasks as originally planned, the startup moved to a pure marketplace model connecting buyers and sellers. Its product is now essentially supply chain AI agents that customers use to find specific suppliers, parts, or manufacturing and engineering services.

Kosmides said his startup is like an AI-driven version of what Alibaba did in China, where the e-commerce giant created a marketplace for contract manufacturers.

The reinvention slowed Bloom's fundraising plans. Kosmides, sounding relieved, said he's "excited to be done with fundraising and get to back to building."

Why did SNAK pass, then come back?

SNAK first met Bloom in April of last year, early in the reinvention. 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," SNAK wrote in a blog post. "We said so plainly and kept tracking the company."

Bloom kept in touch as it became 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 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," the firm wrote. "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."

Kosmides said the fundraising environment has been ruthless for startups like Bloom, where proving value is harder as leading AI models keep improving.

"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, 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."

How does the matchmaking work?

Bloom's platform handles both sides of a supplier relationship. Some customers post contract opportunities; others bid on them. Bloom handles quoting, booking, and payment in one place, and matches companies with suppliers for:

• Contract manufacturing and assembly
• Design and engineering
• Freight and warehousing
• Repairs and 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."

The system runs on data about each provider — much of it public, such as how a company describes itself on its website. Around 30-40% of that data comes directly from the companies, Kosmides said. Add data generated as Bloom onboards customers and makes matches, and that's the startup's edge.

"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 also sees the platform creating opportunities for small manufacturers without big marketing budgets or sales teams. 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 — and now bids 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."