Azoma raises $11.2M to help brands get recommended by AI shopping assistants

Azoma has raised an $11.2M Series A led by Puma Growth Partners, with dunnhumby, Twin Path, MaRS IAF, Rank Ventures and Ignite Ventures also participating. The round follows a $4M seed late last year, and the company says revenue has grown nearly tenfold over the past year while its team went from 12 to 40. Its clients include L’Oréal, Unilever, Mars, Beiersdorf and Reckitt.

What Azoma does is worth paying attention to, because it names a shift that is coming for every consumer brand. As more people shop by asking an AI agent — “what’s the best moisturiser for sensitive skin?” — rather than scrolling a retailer’s search results, the commercially vital question becomes: will the assistant recommend my product? Azoma’s platform, which it calls “agentic commerce optimization,” tracks how brands’ products surface across AI shopping assistants and tries to improve their standing, with attribution and optimisation tools built partly on dunnhumby’s retail data.

Why it matters

This is, in substance, the commerce version of the answer-engine optimisation problem we think about for our own content: when an AI, not a search page, is the thing recommending products, the old playbook of SEO and paid placement doesn’t straightforwardly apply, and nobody yet knows the new rules. A tool that even measures how an AI assistant treats your products is solving a problem brands are only just realising they have. That is the bull case.

The bear case is in the same sentence. The AI assistants are black boxes whose recommendation behaviour is opaque, unstable and controlled by a handful of US platforms; “optimising” for them is a moving target, and it is not yet clear the assistants will allow it to work for long. It is an early bet on a category that may or may not solidify.

A note on why there’s no directory entry: Azoma describes itself as based in London and Toronto, and we couldn’t confirm a single UK headquarters. Since our directory lists UK-headquartered companies only, we’re covering this as news for now — the same call we made on Harmonic Security and ClearDraft — rather than adding a profile.