Azoma secures $4m to boost brand discovery in AI-driven shopping

Serial tech entrepreneur Max Sinclair has secured $4 million in fresh funding for his latest venture, Azoma, as the company positions itself at the forefront of AI-powered product discovery for global retailers and consumer brands.

London and Toronto-based Azoma (formerly Ecomtent) specialises in Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) for ecommerce, helping retailers optimise product visibility in the new era of AI-powered shopping.

Azoma announced the pre-Series A investment from Ignite Ventures, Rank Ventures, eBay Ventures x Techstars, Twinpath Ventures, Canada’s MaRS IAF and strategic angel investors from both the retail and AI worlds.

The raise follows a period of rapid growth, with Azoma achieving seven-figure revenues in under ten months and reaching profitability in the second quarter of 2025.

Founded by former Amazon executive Sinclair and AI specialist Dr Timur Luguev, Azoma already counts household-names Mars, Colgate, Zappos, P&G, Reckitt, Beiersdorf and Canadian Tire among its clients. The new funding will be used to accelerate international expansion and meet soaring demand from brands seeking visibility in an AI-driven retail landscape.

Sinclair said: “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, AI will be physically embedded into everyday appliances, from smart mirrors recommending skincare to devices analysing our biometrics. Through all these changes, brands still need to remain visible and trusted – and that’s exactly what Azoma exists to ensure.”

A former Amazon executive, Sinclair spent six years at the online global giant. He held various leadership positions that shaped his understanding of the e-commerce landscape. He led the launch of Amazon Business (B2B) in the UK, oversaw customer browse and catalogue quality for Amazon’s launch in Singapore, and played a key role in scaling up Amazon’s Grocery business across the EU.

“I learnt about the intricacies of online retail and the challenges faced by sellers and retailers and saw the potential of AI in e-commerce after witnessing the capabilities of Stable Diffusion, an AI model that can generate high-quality images from text descriptions.”

In 2022, he teamed up with Timur Luguev, who has a PhD in AI. Recognising the transformative power of this technology, they developed a minimum viable product (MVP) over a single weekend, and the rest was history.

Azoma’s patented platform allows brands to track how they appear in AI-generated answers across tools such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Amazon’s Rufus shopping assistant. It also enables one-click creation of AI-optimised product content, supported by a “digital twin” simulation that predicts how AI systems will respond before content goes live.

The rise of AI-powered commerce is already reshaping consumer behaviour. Research shows that 74 per cent of shoppers now use AI tools during their purchasing journey, while Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently revealed that users of Rufus are 60 per cent more likely to convert than those relying on traditional search.

Investors believe Azoma is uniquely positioned to help brands navigate a seismic shift in how products are discovered.

John Spindler, general partner at Twinpath Ventures, said: “Azoma’s patented AI is enabling world-leading customers to protect hundreds of years of brand value while reaching entirely new generations of consumers in the age of AI-powered search.”

For Sinclair, Azoma represents the next phase in a journey that began inside the world’s largest ecommerce company and evolved through earlier entrepreneurial success.

“What we know today will soon look unrecognisable,” he said. “The same way we look back at prehistoric humans. We are moving into an AI-search-based future, and our role is to make sure brands are prepared for it.”

www.azoma.ai