Kristian Lukauskis & Alexander Dillon Join Europe's Youngest Founders with $500K AI Startup Raise

Daily Mail​

a day ago

Most 20-year-olds are navigating early career choices or completing university coursework. Kristian Lukauskis and Alexander Dillon are doing something entirely different. They have raised half a million dollars to bring artificial intelligence into the heart of e-commerce operations and they are doing it before their company has even launched.
The two founders are the minds behind ChatBlu, an ambitious startup that has secured $500,000 in pre-seed funding to build what they call the first fully autonomous inventory management agent for online stores. Their goal is clear: give store owners a way to run their inventory systems on autopilot, across multiple platforms, without needing to hire a single manager.
The Spark Behind the Idea
ChatBlu was born from a frustration both founders shared that despite the tools and dashboards available, inventory management remained chaotic for millions of e-commerce sellers. Over 30 million online shops globally are still manually adjusting stock, updating listings, and managing pricing across different platforms. The cost of this inefficiency is staggering. According to industry estimates, it leads to over $1.8 trillion in lost revenue every year from overstocking, understocking, and missed sales.
'People think e-commerce has already been automated, but when you look behind the curtain, the operations are still painfully manual,' says Lukauskis. 'You are juggling all the online retail sites, and trying to keep everything aligned without mistakes. It is exhausting.'
Their solution is an artificial intelligence agent that can take over these decisions and execute them across every connected platform. Sellers simply type commands, such as changing prices, applying discounts, or updating listings, and the agent implements the changes in real time. According to the team, this can improve conversion rates by up to 20 percent through intelligent product listing optimization alone.
A Team Built to Execute
What makes this story even more compelling is the team. Miami-native Lukauskis, had already built several profitable online businesses before turning 20. Dillon, based in the UK, studied at Loughborough University and brings a strategic lens to the operation. Together, they recruited a seasoned technologist to bring their idea to life. Sairam Vangapally, the 32-year-old Chief Technology Officer, is a hugely experienced data engineer with deep experience in AI systems and infrastructure.
'We wanted this product to be technically robust from day one,' says Dillon. 'So we brought on people who had scaled systems at multi-national online retail giants and worked on real enterprise-level infrastructure. It is not about hype. It is about building something that actually works at scale.'
The rest of the team includes professionals who have spent time at huge global consumer brands. Their backgrounds span product development, machine learning, and enterprise software. This level of experience is rare for a startup still in pre-launch, but it underscores the seriousness of the vision.
The Institutions That Believed Early
ChatBlu is part of the 2024–2025 cohort of the Genoa Entrepreneurship School, an institution known for helping student founders raise capital and launch real businesses without taking time off from their education. Genoa Entrepreneurship School has a 75% success rate in helping its students raise funding. For Lukauskis and Dillon, the school did more than provide validation. It opened doors to a network of top-tier mentors from high profile, market-shaping companies, and it helped them shape a pitch that secured real investor interest.
That interest translated into capital. The $500,000 round was led by Matador VC, a firm that has recently backed multiple Y Combinator companies. Angel investors from Amazon Web Services and Google also joined the round. Their backing puts Lukauskis and Dillon among the youngest founders in both Europe and North America to have secured pre-seed funding of this size.
'Having raised €1 million at 23 while studying, I know how hard it is to build at a young age. We saw the spark and the right attitude in Lukauskis, and we are proud to support him and those set to impact the world,' says Guglielmo Schenardi, founder of Genoa Entrepreneurship School.
A Clear Vision for Launch
ChatBlu plans to launch publicly in September. The initial rollout will focus on English-speaking markets, with plans to expand into the Hispanic e-commerce space by next year. Store owners using global e-tail platforms will be able to connect their stores to the ChatBlu agent, give it simple instructions, and let it handle everything from pricing logic to stock visibility to discount syncing.
'This is not about replacing people with robots. It is about removing tedious tasks so founders can spend their energy on what actually grows the business,' Lukauskis says. 'Inventory should be invisible. You should never have to think about it.'
As competition increases and margins tighten, automation will become the difference between staying afloat and scaling profitably. For Lukauskis and Dillon, the timing is perfect. Their product aims to solve a real problem that drains time and resources from nearly every online store on the planet.
And if they succeed, it will not just be a story of two young founders getting funded. It will be the beginning of a new way to run e-commerce, one where the only thing a seller needs to do is ask.