%201.webp)
Azoma has raised USD $11.2 million in a Series A funding round led by Puma Growth Partners, with backing from strategic and financial investors.
Participants included dunnhumby, Twin Path, MaRS IAF, Rank Ventures and Ignite Ventures, as well as angel investors from Google DeepMind and Legora. The company plans to use the funding to expand its platform for AI personal assistants, develop optimisation and attribution tools for consumer brands using dunnhumby data, and hire more staff, with a focus on AI specialists.
Founded in 2022, Azoma operates from Toronto and London. It was set up by former Amazon executive Max Sinclair and machine learning researcher Timur Luguev. The company sells software designed to help brands track and influence how products appear in AI shopping tools and assistants.
Revenue has increased almost tenfold over the past year, while headcount has grown from 12 to 40, according to Azoma. Its customers include L'Oréal, Unilever, Mars, Beiersdorf and Reckitt.
The latest investment follows a previously announced USD $4 million seed round. It comes as technology suppliers and consumer brands look for ways to respond to the growing role of generative AI tools and automated shopping assistants in product search and purchase decisions.
Market shift
Azoma uses the term Agentic Commerce Optimization to describe the practice of making products discoverable, understandable and recommended by large language model applications, retailer shopping assistants and personal AI agents. The category overlaps with the broader fields of AEO and GEO, but focuses on product recommendation and purchase pathways rather than general AI-generated responses.
The company cited a McKinsey estimate that agentic commerce could account for USD $5 trillion globally by 2030, including as much as USD $1 trillion in US retail revenue. That projection has helped draw investor interest to software vendors seeking to establish measurement standards and services around AI-driven commerce.
Azoma said it co-authored what it describes as an industry framework with the Digital Shelf Institute. Known as the 5 C's of Agentic Commerce, it covers Completeness, Context, Citations, Correctness and Customer Acquisition.
According to the company, the framework is used by 40% of the 50 largest consumer packaged goods groups. It also said it holds two granted patents related to AI brand monitoring and AI product content creation.
Different sources
A central part of Azoma's pitch is that different AI services rely on sharply different information sources when generating shopping recommendations. The company said its analysis of 38 million citations found that editorial coverage accounted for 51.9% of citations used by Google Gemini, but only 7.6% in Google AI Overviews. Affiliate content, meanwhile, made up 39.6% of Alexa for Shopping citations and less than 2% on every other engine it measured.
That variation has created a new set of marketing and eCommerce questions for large consumer groups, particularly those with broad product portfolios sold across multiple retailers. Retailer-specific assistants, general-purpose chatbots and personal AI agents may all present different products, references and rankings in response to the same shopper prompt.
Azoma said its software includes a digital twin system designed to simulate different AI shopper personas. The aim is to let a brand assess how products are shown to a specific buyer type, rather than relying on a single overall visibility measure.
Puma Growth Partners said Azoma has established an early position in a fast-changing area of eCommerce. "
We are delighted to be backing Max, Timur and the wider Azoma team as they capitalise on one of the fastest shifts we have seen in eCommerce. Azoma has built a defensible measurement solution in a category it helped create, with enterprise customers already in place. Their clients are at the very forefront of eCommerce, manage vast portfolios of staple household goods and are trusting Azoma to help optimize their approach to market. We look forward to supporting their next phase of growth," said Henri Songeur, Investment Director, Puma Growth Partners.
Sinclair said automated shopping assistants are already reshaping online buying behaviour.
"Three hundred and fifty million people used Alexa for Shopping last year. Walmart customers who use their AI Shopping Assistant Sparky spend 40% more than those who don't. Instinct, the personal AI assistant that launched in August with zero marketing budget, already accounts for $1bn in transactions, and is growing at a rate of 10% day over day. Agent-to-agent commerce has arrived faster than anyone expected. For our customers, this will be more transformational than the internet. Agentic Commerce will be on a par with how electrification birthed or transformed these enterprise consumer brands," said Max Sinclair, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Azoma.