HI Engine has raised €300k pre-seed to bring the "Cursor moment" to Shopify growth

We've raised a €300,000 pre-seed round combining an R&D loan from Business Finland with backing from friends, family, and a handful of operators who believe Shopify merchants deserve better than dashboards.

If you've spent any time around software engineers lately, you've seen how dramatically their workflow has changed. Developers now manage fleets of agents, often running five to ten simultaneous tasks in different terminal windows. We're convinced that Shopify growth work is set for a similar revolution.

However, the shift is still held back by a fundamental constraint. While coding agents can tap into a codebase, growth teams juggle Shopify, GA4, Klaviyo, Search Console, Clarity, and a dozen other tools — each telling a slightly different story. Critical information, such as why conversion dropped last Tuesday or which product page is quietly bleeding €1,200 a month, has to be pieced together from fragmented signals across systems that don't talk to each other.

Because of this gap, merchants are stuck with tools that report plausible-sounding numbers, but don't actually understand what your store sells, to whom, or why it's not converting.

The Shopify context graph

Ever since the first iteration of HI Engine, we've been obsessed with how to make sprawling store knowledge more accessible to AI and, thereby, more useful for the merchants running the business.

This has evolved into the unique core of our product today: a purpose-built Shopify context graph that we build automatically from your existing stack.

It mirrors how a senior CRO consultant would get up to speed on your store, synthesizing your products, traffic patterns, checkout behaviour, lifecycle flows, support tickets, and competitive position. This gives HI Engine the context it needs to surface real opportunities from day one — not generic "best practices" copy-pasted from a playbook.

Making growth work human again

HI Engine uses its understanding to generate your most important deliverables — prioritized action queues, weekly Store Health Scores, one-click quick wins, and test hypotheses. Every recommendation is grounded in your actual data, benchmarked against similar stores, and attached to an estimated €/month impact so you know what's worth doing.

This is why our early customers trust HI Engine with decisions that used to take a six-week agency audit. On average, stores finish their first actionable insight in two minutes, not two weeks, and see a +2.1% conversion rate lift within the first 90 days. Every change feeds back into HI Engine's context graph, creating a compounding store memory that keeps getting sharper.

Instead of scrambling to figure out what to test next, your team can focus on work that truly moves the needle: building a brand customers love, launching products that sell themselves, and making decisions backed by real data.

The next 18 months

Ecommerce growth work will change more in the next 18 months than it has in the last decade, and the three years we spent running 100+ Shopify migrations at Brancoy mean we're perfectly positioned for this shift. We've seen the patterns. We've fixed the same friction in fifty different stores. Now we're automating it.

Our ambition is to become the default growth partner for Shopify merchants globally, and one of the standout AI companies coming out of the Nordics. This pre-seed is the first step toward that goal, and we're grateful to Business Finland for backing our R&D and to the friends, family, and operators who took a bet on us this early.

Above all, this round is a testament to our early customers who let us plug into their stores, challenged our assumptions, and kept pushing us to ship faster. Thank you. We'll use this funding to build an even better product, even faster, for every single one of you.

Merchants who aren't yet using HI Engine can start their 14-day free trial today, or reach out to our team at hello@hiengine.ai.

If you want to go a step further and join us in building at the forefront of applied AI for commerce, we're hiring across Engineering, CRO, and Growth.

Arttu Hietala, Samuli Ala-Kasari & Valtteri Tuominen

Founders, HI Engine

Arttu Hietala and Samuli Ala-Kasari are ecommerce operators and co-founders of HI Engine. They also run Brancoy, the Shopify agency behind 100+ migrations and brands including Billebeino, Hagelstam, BioGaia, Mysoda, and Innolux — the live testing ground that continuously shapes HI Engine. Valtteri Tuominen is Founding CTO, previously building data infrastructure for high-growth commerce companies.