Former Flipkart executive Ranjith Boyanapalli launches AI-powered shopping assistant

Flash.co, a platform founded by former Flipkart senior vice president Ranjith Boyanapalli, has launched an artificial intelligence-powered shopping assistant in more than 100 countries.

Founded in 2022, Flash.co, has raised $12.5 million from investors like Global Founders Capital, White Venture Capital, Zinal Growth and other angel investors.

Its new shopping assistant, Flash AI, helps online shoppers compare products from different channels on a single platform. Shoppers can add flash.co/ before the URL of any product on the website and a page will show up with the product details, ratings, reviews and summary. It will also show a price comparison across websites and channels such as ecommerce and quick commerce.


“With Flash.co we have focused on post-purchase requirements of the users and now we want to help the customers with their pre-purchase requirements,” Boyanapalli said in a conversation with ET. “Through our new offering we want to help shoppers make faster and better decisions,” Boyanapalli said.

“We have seen many people go to conversational AI agents to look for a certain product by putting specific keywords. Instead of changing shoppers’ search behaviour and focusing on keywords, we are helping them make better decisions using AI on whether they are buying at the right place and for the right price,” he said.

Flash AI uses crawlers and scrapers to collect data from across the internet beyond the online marketplace, including YouTube, Reddit, expert blogs and Google reviews to give a detailed summary of the items.

Currently, Flash AI is available for free but the company plans to put its advanced version, which offers detailed summary and more benefits, behind a paywall, Boyanapalli said.

At Flipkart, Boyanapalli was overseeing fintech and payments, customer experience and marketplace segments until 2021.

After leaving the Walmart-backed company, he started Flash.co, which provides services like custom-made email accounts to build unified digital identities across ecommerce platforms for shoppers. So far, Flash.co has tracked more than 70 million orders and has over 1.5 million downloads, he said.

In November 2024, Flash.co expanded its services to the US, as part of its plans to expand the services across geographies.