Flash AI  ·  Founder's Note  ·  April 2026

Every person deserves the truth about what they are buying.

Shopping was supposed to get easier. Instead, it got noisier.

More products. More reviews. More opinions. Less clarity. Even after 18 years in e-commerce — building payments, checkout, and marketplace systems at scale — I still made bad purchase decisions. I have bought moisturisers that turned my skin oily. Earphones that felt wrong the moment I put them on. A laptop bag that was the wrong size for my machine. Not because I did not try. Because the truth about a product was never in one place.

The information exists — a Reddit thread here, a YouTube review there, a blog post buried three searches deep. But it is fragmented, inconsistent, and often biased. So shoppers guess. And then they return. 81% of Indian shoppers returned something last year — not because the product was wrong, but because the decision was.

TripAdvisor showed what an unbiased decision layer looks like in travel. It earned trust because hotels could not buy their way to the top. That model never emerged in commerce. It could not. Marketplaces generate billions from sponsored listings — they are structurally unable to be unbiased. The decision layer had to be built outside the system.

Google owned discovery. Marketplaces owned transactions. Nobody owns decisions.

AI changes this now

AI does not just improve search. It compresses decision-making from days to seconds — and makes it personal.

01
Research becomes instant
What took 13 days now takes 30 seconds. AI synthesises multiple sources simultaneously — YouTube reviews, Reddit communities, expert blogs, verified buyers — structured into a verdict.
02
Research becomes personal
What required a skincare expert now requires context. AI can factor in your skin type, your budget, your past purchases, your specific use case — and give you an answer built for your specific context, not a generic one.
03
Research becomes comprehensive
AI can aggregate across every signal that matters — expert opinion, community experience, pricing intelligence — and compress it without losing the nuance.

But capability alone is not enough. The real shift is behavioural. 50 million shopping queries are already happening on ChatGPT every day. 64% of Indian consumers are now using GenAI for shopping decisions. Users are comfortable asking before they buy. Decision-making is being decoupled from marketplaces. AI-referred shoppers convert 31% better than standard traffic, and are 68% less likely to return what they bought.

For the first time, the decision layer can exist as its own product. Google built a $4 billion annual revenue business in India by owning search intent. Amazon and Flipkart built $1.2 billion by owning product discovery. The decision layer sits upstream of both — and it is still unclaimed.

Why this will not be owned by general AI or marketplaces

The obvious question is why ChatGPT or Perplexity cannot own this layer. The answer is not capability. It is structural misalignment. A true decision layer requires four things that neither general models nor marketplaces can build.

01
Structured decision interfaces

Shopping is visual and comparative. Decisions require product cards, side-by-side comparisons, and category-specific interfaces — not paragraphs of text. Flash is built to know every option in a category and surface what is genuinely best, regardless of who paid to be visible.

02
A complete commerce graph

Not just top results — every product, price, and merchant, continuously updated. General models have no real-time commerce data and no incentive to build it. They cannot tell you what a product costs today, or whether it was cheaper last week.

03
Persistent personalisation

Preferences, purchase history, context. General models start from scratch every session. Flash builds your profile over time and uses it to anticipate what you need — not just respond to what you asked.

04
Incentive alignment

Marketplaces cannot recommend competitors. Amazon cannot tell you to buy on Flipkart. Flipkart cannot tell you a competing product is better. They generate billions from sponsored listings — they are structurally unable to be unbiased.

What Flash is building

Every person deserves the truth about what they are buying. Flash is how they get it.

Flash is the layer between intent and purchase. Before you buy anything that matters, you ask Flash. In seconds, Flash tells you: is it actually good, is it right for you, and where should you buy it — across every product, every category, every merchant. No login. No friction. No bias.

Built on commerce-specific data that general models do not have and cannot quickly replicate, with a seven-month head start on building it. Every interaction improves the system. Every decision makes the next one better. This is not a feature. It is a compounding advantage.

Flash grows in three stages, each building on the last.

01
Own the decision layer — now

The core research product — synthesising expert reviews, YouTube, Reddit, and verified buyer signals into a clear, structured verdict, accessible instantly from any surface. Zero friction, no login required. The goal is trust: the kind that no marketplace can build because they are structurally conflicted, and no general model can build because they do not have the data depth.

02
Build personalisation depth — next 12 months

Skin analysers, face shape analysers, ingredient compatibility engines, spec-weighted scoring for electronics. Personalised storefronts where Flash knows your preferences and surfaces what is right for you before you ask. Flash stops being a tool you reach for and becomes the layer you rely on. Brands pay to be present where purchase decisions are made — the B2B surface that makes Flash indispensable to every brand in Indian commerce, not just every shopper.

03
Close the loop — 18 to 24 months

Today a buy-now click exits to Flipkart or Nykaa. Tomorrow it completes inside Flash. Express checkout, agentic reorder for repeat purchases, deep merchant integrations. Flash moves from advising decisions to making them. The full commerce loop — research to purchase — on one surface.

How people access Flash

We do not ask users to change behaviour. Every Flash user arrives at a product page with intent — they are already considering a purchase. Flash sits at that exact moment, before the decision is made.

That is not just a distribution mechanic. It is a structural position. By intercepting intent at scale — across every product, every merchant, every surface — Flash has the ability to influence which product a shopper chooses, and where they buy it. That is demand-shaping power. It compounds as the user base grows, and it costs almost nothing to acquire.

01
URL prepend

Prepend flash.co/ before any product URL on any marketplace. Full research view instantly — no account, no install, no friction.

flash.co/amazon.in/dp/B08…
02
Mobile share

Share any product from Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra or any browser directly to Flash. Native to how Indian shoppers browse on mobile.

iOS & Android app
03
Chrome extension

Installed once, activates automatically on every product page across any e-commerce site. Research appears without switching tabs.

Available on Chrome Web Store

Flash intercepts purchase intent at the moment it is highest — when a shopper has a product in mind and is about to decide. Every session is an opportunity to shape that decision: which product, which variant, which merchant. The data shows what that power looks like at scale.

The numbers so far

We launched in September 2025. Seven months in, here is an account – the metrics that matter, and the ones that still need work.

3.5M
Total users
Sep '25 – Mar '26
9M
Products researched
to date
₹5
Blended CAC
(~$0.05)
50%+
Month-on-month
user growth
Metric Sep '25 Oct '25 Nov '25 Dec '25 Jan '26 Feb '26 Mar '26
Monthly Users 111k 200k 306k 505k 565k 933k 1.04M
Products Researched 207k 358k 588k 1.06M 1.32M 2.07M 2.6M
CAC (₹) ₹17.5 ₹10.1 ₹8.2 ₹4.3 ₹3.6 ₹2.2 ₹2.1
Tech cost / product ₹12.4 ₹3.8 ₹2.4 ₹1.9 ₹2.6 ₹1.7 ₹0.9
SimilarWeb · Commerce AI · Global ranking · Feb 2026
# Platform Country Monthly Visits Avg Duration Pages/Visit Bounce Rate
1 Flash AI India 2.6M 3:36 5.99 30.9%
2 Dupe US 975k 1:47 4.18 37.0%
3 StyleDNA US 424k 1:26 4.35 46.6%
4 Phia US 188k 1:24 2.73 41.7%
5 Alta US 178k 2:09 4.05 51.1%
6 Vetted US 42k 0:51 1.79 57.6%
7 Daydream US 39k 0:52 3.38 42.2%
Source: SimilarWeb, Feb 2026. Flash AI leads on every engagement metric — visits, session duration, pages per visit, and bounce rate.

Who uses Flash – and why it matters

Audience mix
100% Users arrive directly on a product page – the highest-intent surface in e-commerce
75% Users from Metro and Tier-1 cities
83% Users under 34 – the AI-native shopping cohort
26% iOS share – meaningfully above Indian e-com average
Purchase intent
25–28% Buy-now click rate in beauty and electronics
19% Add-to-cart rate vs 9% Indian e-com benchmark – 2× industry average

What we are building next

The long-term roadmap is set. The next 90 days are about three things: making Flash the discovery destination, building the habits that bring users back, and converting research into revenue.

01
Conversational discovery

Ask Flash what to buy in plain language. Share a reel or a screenshot and get instant research on the products in it. Scan a shelf in-store and compare alternatives in real time.

02
Deeper category intelligence

Skin analysers, ingredient compatibility engines, face shape analysers for BPC. Structured spec-comparison interfaces and shelf-scan research for electronics and appliances. The features that make Flash irreplaceable in a category — and that give users a reason to open Flash before they even have a product in mind.

03
Monetisation at scale

Three levers in parallel: high-intent advertising on product research pages, AI shopping assistant deployments on brand storefronts, and in-session checkout that closes the purchase without leaving Flash. Each earns independently. All three are in motion.


The belief

Shopping doesn't need more choice. It needs clarity.

Google helps you find.
Marketplaces help you buy.
Flash helps you decide.

Once the decision layer is owned, the rest of commerce follows.