SaaS firm Azoma raises £8m led by Puma Growth Partners and Dunnhumby
This article covers Azoma, a SaaS startup, which has raised £8m in a series A funding round led by Puma Growth Partners to expand its Agentic Commerce Optimization platform. The funding will support product expansion across emerging AI personal assistants, deeper optimisation and attribution capabilities for enterprise consumer brands, and further hiring of AI specialists to help brands be found and recommended by AI shopping agents.
Azoma, a SaaS startup, has raised £8 million in a series A funding round led by Puma Growth Partners to expand its Agentic Commerce Optimization platform that helps consumer brands be found and recommended by AI shopping agents. The round, which follows a $4 million seed round announced in December 2025, will fund product expansion across emerging AI personal assistants, deeper optimisation and attribution capabilities for enterprise consumer brands, and further hiring of AI specialists.
Why it matters
AI-powered shopping assistants are becoming a mainstream discovery channel for purchases, and brands that are not optimised for those agents risk losing visibility and sales. McKinsey estimates agentic commerce could be worth as much as $5 trillion globally by 2030, including up to $1 trillion in US retail revenue. Azoma’s funding arrives as several large assistants scale rapidly: three hundred and fifty million people used Alexa for Shopping last year; Walmart’s Sparky users spend more than non-users; and newer assistants such as Instinct have already generated large transaction volumes.
For consumer brands with large product portfolios, the shift from search and marketplaces to agent-driven answers changes which signals matter - editorial, affiliate and product data play different roles across agents. Azoma positions itself as a measurement and optimisation layer for that new channel.
Inside the product
Azoma combines measurement, optimisation and execution across product data, content and third-party sources to influence how AI systems discover, interpret and recommend products. The company measures an “AI share of voice” across assistants and benchmarks brands against competitors, blending what it calls AEO/GEO measurement with executional tools.
Its Digital Twin technology simulates different AI shopper personas so brands can see how specific buyer profiles are shown products rather than relying on a single visibility score. Azoma also holds two granted patents covering AI brand monitoring and AI product content creation.
Clients include large consumer goods firms such as L'Oréal, Unilever, Mars, Beiersdorf and Reckitt. These companies manage vast product portfolios and depend on third-party channels and content partners for distribution and discovery; Azoma’s platform is used to audit and optimise those signals across multiple AI assistants.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Puma Growth Partners and included participation from dunnhumby, Twin Path, MaRS IAF, Rank Ventures, Ignite Ventures and angels from Google DeepMind and Legora.
Puma Growth Partners led the deal and frames Azoma as a measurement-first entrant in a nascent category it helped establish. dunnhumby is a long-established customer data science firm that works with retailers and consumer brands, signalling strategic alignment between retail insights and agentic commerce measurement. MaRS IAF is a Canadian investor active in early-stage ventures, reflecting the company’s Toronto roots alongside its London presence. The involvement of angels from Google DeepMind suggests interest from AI research-aligned talent networks.
In the announcement, Henri Songeur, Investment Director at Puma Growth Partners, said:
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 e-commerce. 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 e-commerce, 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.
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Founder perspective
Azoma was founded in 2022 by former Amazon executive Max Sinclair and machine learning PhD and postdoctoral researcher Timur Luguev. The company says revenue grew almost tenfold over the past year while headcount rose from 12 to 40, and it operates from offices in Toronto and London.
In the announcement, Max Sinclair, Co-founder & CEO at Azoma, said:
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.
The bigger picture
Azoma’s raise underlines three linked trends: rapid growth in AI shopping assistants, increased demand from consumer brands for measurement tools that span multiple agents, and investor appetite for startups that bridge data science and commerce execution. The company’s client list of major CPGs and its claimed adoption of the 5 C's of Agentic Commerce framework with the Digital Shelf Institute show an early focus on enterprise customers managing complex portfolios.
Regulatory and competitive dynamics will matter as agentic commerce scales - platform policies, provenance of citations and the role of affiliate and editorial content differ between assistants. Brands and their advisers will need clearer standards for attribution and discoverability, and vendors such as Azoma aim to set those metrics.
This funding round adds to a broader picture of UK and European interest in tools that help brands adapt to AI-driven commerce channels, while highlighting the cross-Atlantic nature of the market: product development and investor networks span London and Toronto as this new commerce layer matures.
They've invested in Azoma
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| Investors | Investment Focus | Startup Investments | Round Size | Connect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Puma Growth Partners( ) Partners for Growth is the private equity division of Puma Capital Group, invest... London  | ||||
 MaRS IAF( ) Toronto, Canada  | ||||
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 Ignite Ventures( ) | ||||
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