AI search visibility platform Azoma has secured investment from Tesco-owned Dunnhumby.
The UK-based startup – which measures and improves how AI shopping agents discover, interpret and recommend products for retailers and brands – will use the funding to accelerate its expansion and product roadmap.
As part of the investment – the value of which was not disclosed – Dunnhumby “will be able to extend how it supports its retailer clients” and help them “optimise their customer-facing chat agents”, while providing brands with the ability to boost “their discoverability and relevance in the new agentic commerce ecosystem”.
“Dunnhumby has decades of expertise helping brands and retailers leverage customer data insight,” said Max Sinclair, CEO and co-founder of Azoma.
“Agentic commerce is the next frontier. Dunnhumby understands this, and brands and retailers’ current data blindness, better than anyone. Their investment is a vote of confidence in our current solution and shared vision. In time, their data will help us demonstrate to the world’s largest retailers and consumer brands the tangible value of agent-driven recommendations.”
Late last year, The Grocer revealed how Arla and Mars were piloting Azoma’s platform to help them be “seen, surfaced, and preferred” by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, as well as retailer AI chatbots like Walmart’s Sparky or Carrefour’s Hopla. Smaller brands including matcha drink brand PerfectTed and protein bar brand David Protein are also working with Azoma on a “full service” basis.
In April, Tesco launched a trial of an AI assistant built into the supermarket’s app, with which customers can converse to find personalised recipes ideas and add the required ingredients to their basket. The AI assistant has launched to 280,000 Tesco colleagues, and will be rolled out to all customers later this year.
Azoma was founded in 2022, “as soon as we saw ChatGPT launch”, said Sinclair, who prior to launching the company worked at Amazon for six years, several of them in search. In December, it raised £3m in a pre-Series A round with participation from Ignite Ventures, Rank Ventures, eBay Ventures x Techstars, Twinpath, MaRS IAF, and angel investors.
Azoma analysis of tens of millions of AI responses in the second quarter of 2026 found that earned and social media accounts for 86.5% of the citations behind Alexa for Shopping’s recommendations, and 76% of those behind Walmart Sparky’s. ChatGPT draws more heavily on retailer sources, at 37.1%.
“The answer a shopper receives is therefore assembled largely from sources the brand does not own,” Azoma says. “This AI visibility problem is what the investment will solve for commerce and CPG brands.”
The new funds will accelerate Azoma’s product roadmap for its existing customers including L’Oréal, Unilever and Mars, while “reinforcing Dunnhumby’s commitment to rapid innovation in AI”.
“AI shopping assistants are rewriting the path to purchase, and today retailers and CPGs have no reliable way to connect what an agent recommends to a sale,” said Leo Nagdas, head of Dunnhumby ventures, who has joined Azoma as advisor to the board as part of the investment.
“Azoma is a leader in the emerging agentic commerce space, and the team combines real depth in AI with a practical grasp of how retail actually works. Backing companies like Azoma is how we bring emerging technology to our clients as consumer behaviours and retail ecosystems keep changing,” Nagdas added.
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