Startup raises $11.2 million to help brands win over AI shopping assistants

Azoma, a startup that helps consumer brands get noticed by AI shopping assistants, has raised $11.2 million in Series A funding. A Series A is an early funding round for a young company. Puma Growth Partners led it. The deal shows investors are betting that AI tools will shape which products people see and buy.

What Azoma does

Azoma calls its approach Agentic Commerce Optimization, or ACO. In plain terms, it means making products easier for AI systems to find and understand when those systems help people decide what to buy. That includes ChatGPT and Gemini, retailer assistants such as Alexa for Shopping, Walmart Sparky and Instacart Clementine, and personal AI agents.

Each AI looks in different places

Azoma says each assistant leans on different sources when it recommends something. The company analyzed 38 million citations, meaning the sources the tools point to. Two examples stood out:

• Editorial coverage was 51.9% of Google Gemini citations but 7.6% in Google AI Overviews.
• Affiliate content was 39.6% of Alexa for Shopping citations but under 2% on every other engine measured.

The takeaway is that one approach may not work for every assistant.

The company and the money

Azoma announced a $4 million seed round in December 2025. It says revenue has grown nearly tenfold over the past year, and its team has grown from 12 to 40 people. Clients include L'Oréal, Unilever, Mars, Beiersdorf and Reckitt. Other investors include dunnhumby, Twin Path, MaRS IAF, Rank Ventures and Ignite Ventures, plus angel investors from Google DeepMind and Legora.

Former Amazon executive Max Sinclair and machine learning researcher Timur Luguev founded the company in 2022. It plans to expand across AI personal assistants and shopping agents, build more tools to measure results using dunnhumby data, and keep hiring AI talent.

How the product works

Azoma and the Digital Shelf Institute built a framework called the 5 C's of Agentic Commerce: Completeness, Context, Citations, Correctness and Customer Acquisition. Azoma says it is being used at 40% of the 50 largest consumer packaged goods companies. Its Digital Twin tool simulates different AI shopper types, so brands can see how each kind of customer might come across their products. The company also holds two patents.

What is not known yet

Many of the big claims come from Azoma's CEO. He says Alexa for Shopping had 350 million users last year, Walmart shoppers who use Sparky spend 40% more, and a personal assistant called Instinct already accounts for $1 billion in transactions. The material offers no independent check of these figures. It also does not give pricing or show how well Azoma's methods work for any single brand.

Why it matters

Azoma serves large companies, but the idea reaches further. If AI assistants increasingly shape who gets found, any seller may want to check how these tools describe their business and which sources they rely on.