Azoma raises $11.2m to measure how AI shopping agents rank brands
The London-based startup, backed by Puma Growth Partners and dunnhumby, sells brands a view of how ChatGPT, Gemini and Walmart’s Sparky choose which products to recommend
- Lead investor: Puma Growth Partners
- Previous round: $4m (£3m) seed, December 2025
- Founded: 2022 by Max Sinclair, a former Amazon executive, and Timur Luguev, a machine learning researcher
- Patents: two granted, covering AI brand monitoring and AI product content creation, according to Azoma
Brands now buy software to track where they rank inside AI assistants, alongside the tools they already use for search rankings and retail media. Because each assistant leans on different sources, standing in Gemini says little about standing in Alexa for Shopping, which favors tools that track many assistants at once. The dunnhumby data link is meant to tie that visibility to sales, the evidence on which marketing budgets are usually set.
“Agent-to-agent commerce has arrived faster than anyone expected.”Max Sinclair, chief executive and co-founder, Azoma
Azoma, a London-based software company that tracks how AI shopping assistants recommend products, has raised an $11.2m (£8.4m) Series A led by Puma Growth Partners, it announced on 21 October.
Retail data company dunnhumby joined the round alongside Twin Path, MaRS IAF, Rank Ventures and Ignite Ventures, plus angel investors from Google DeepMind and Legora. The lead investor typically puts £5m–£15m into scale-ups. Azoma says revenue grew almost tenfold over the past year and its team went from 12 to 40 people. It names L’Oréal, Unilever, Mars, Beiersdorf and Reckitt as customers.
The money will go on extending coverage to personal AI assistants such as ChatGPT Dots and Meta Muse, and on optimization and attribution tools for large consumer brands that draw on dunnhumby data.
Azoma calls its category agentic commerce optimization: getting products found and recommended by chatbots, by retailer assistants such as Alexa for Shopping and Instacart Clementine, and by personal agents. Azoma’s own study of 38 million citations shows how far the assistants differ in where they look. Editorial coverage accounted for 51.9% of Google Gemini’s citations against 7.6% for Google AI Overviews. Affiliate content made up 39.6% of citations in Alexa for Shopping and less than 2% in each of the other engines Azoma tracked. Its release also cites a McKinsey projection that agentic commerce could be worth $5tn (£3.8tn) globally by 2030.
Sources
- Azoma, “Azoma raises $11.2 million Series A to continue defining the agentic commerce optimization category”, press release via GlobeNewswire, 21 October 2026. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/10/21/3385624/0/en/azoma-raises-11-2-million-series-a-to-continue-defining-the-agentic-commerce-optimization-category.html
- Azoma, “Azoma raises $11.2 million Series A to continue defining the agentic commerce optimization category”, GlobeNewswire release (syndicated copy, The Manila Times), 21 October 2026. https://www.manilatimes.net/2026/10/21/tmt-newswire/globenewswire/azoma-raises-112-million-series-a-to-continue-defining-the-agentic-commerce-optimization-category/2450918
- TechStartups, “Azoma raises $11.2M to help brands get discovered and recommended by AI shopping agents”, 21 October 2026. https://techstartups.com/2026/10/21/azoma-raises-11-2m-to-help-brands-get-discovered-and-recommended-by-ai-shopping-agents/
