Azoma, a startup developing search visibility technology optimised for AI, has become the latest in its burgeoning sub-sector to secure funding, raising a pre-Series A investment of $4m (£3m).
AI search is attempting to carve itself out as the new standard for online browsing, impacting billions in industries like ecommerce.
This has naturally led to a nascent but perhaps one day essential service of AI search optimisation, a follow-up to search engine optimisation (SEO) that has been so significant in the online age.
Earlier this week, a London startup called Searchable secured a similarly sized investment off of the promise of supporting visibility from AI searches.
Call it AI optimisation or, as Azoma does, generative engine optimisation (GEO), whatever it is called, there is a view that it could be a serious revenue driver.
Azoma’s particular offering is an end-to-end workflow platform that is used by retailers to “increase their share of visibility in the AI Search era”.
The London and Toronto-based company already lists major brands such as Mars and Colgate as existing customers, and with its new investment it plans to grow rapidly.
“A thousand years ago, the average person owned around a dozen possessions. One hundred years ago, 99% of everything we brought was from a local merchant,” said founder and chief executive Max Sinclair.
“Amazon has now been with us for three decades and the iPhone for just two. Currently, we are in the era of LLM-based commerce. In a year or two, most of our day-to-day shopping will be done by virtual AI Agents.
“In five years or so, we will see AI embedded directly physically into appliances from smart mirrors, recommending skincare, to smart toilets analysing biometrics to optimise diets.”
In Sinclair’s vision of an automated shopping future, it is Azoma that will end up as the “partner of choice for the world’s most loved consumer brands through all of these changes to ensure they remain discoverable and dominant”.
Investors in the round include Ignite Ventures, Rank Ventures, eBay Ventures x Techstars , Twinpath, MaRS IAF and angels including senior staff at DeepMind.
“Azoma’s unique combination of deep industry understanding and state-of-the-art AI has enabled their clients to adapt to the seismic change of LLM powered search,” said John Spindler, general partner at Twinpath Ventures.
“Now used by some of the world’s leading consumer brands, Azoma patented protected AI is enabling world leading customers to not only protect sometimes hundreds years of brand value but also to reach new customers”.
