Recent funding rounds for application-layer AI startups like Azoma, Opply and Profound are backing tools for AI-driven product discovery, marketing and procurement, with food and beverage companies among their customers.
In October, London-based tech companies Azoma and Opply raised $11.2 million and $7.5 million, respectively. And in September, New York City-based Profound raised $180 million in Series D funding.
Azoma and Profound work with clients, including CPG companies, to tackle the challenge of product discovery using artificial intelligence, while Opply is focused on using AI to oversee sourcing and procurement to financing and supply chain management, with a focus on the global CPG industry.
The investments come as technology companies build tools to shift more of the work of product discovery and purchasing to AI assistants. Stakes are high, according to McKinsey, which estimates that agentic commerce could orchestrate as much as $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global consumer goods sales by 2030.
Separately, McKinsey reports notable growth in vertical or industry-specific AI startups, which includes the CPG industry.
An era of AI assistants
Azoma and Profound help brands adapt their marketing to AI-powered search and shopping assistants.
The Series A fundraise for Azoma was led by Puma Growth Partners and includes dunnhumby, Twin Path, MaRS IAF, Rank Ventures and Ignite Ventures and Angels from Google DeepMind and Legora.
Azoma, which was founded in 2022 as Ecomtent by Max Sinclair and Timur Luguev, will use the funding to expand its platform that assists the emerging market of assistants such as Meta Muse, ChatGPT Dots, Amazon Alexa for Shopping, Walmart Sparky and Instacart Clementine, as well as enterprise consumer brands using dunnhumby data.
Sorting out discovery across agentic search can be tricky, according to Azoma.
“Three hundred and fifty million people used Alexa for Shopping last year. Walmart customers who use their AI Shopping Assistant Sparky spend 40% more than those who don’t. Instinct, the personal AI Assistant that launched in August with zero marketing budget, already accounts for $1 billion in transactions, and is growing at a rate of 10% day over day,” said Sinclair. “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 company, which rebranded as Azoma in 2025, names CPG companies Mars and Unilever as brands with whom they are working.
AI marketer as a product
Profound, which was founded in 2024 by James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs, operates in the same space as Azoma in its use of AI to assist companies working to market their products online.
The company already names Fortune 500 retail giants like Walmart among its clients and said it will use the latest round of funding to expand its applied AI labs in New York City and San Francisco.
“The growing team will study how frontier models perform on marketing work, evaluate their capabilities and post-train models specifically for marketing,” the company said.
Cadwallader said that Profound started as a marketing analytics platform to help marketers better understand how buyers discover their brands using AI. The company’s newest tool is AI Marketer, an agent that “works alongside every function of your marketing team, helping ambitious teams take on the campaigns and ideas they haven’t had the capacity or technology to pursue.”
The company said that “answer engines” like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity use hundreds of thousands of sources to develop an opinion of a brand, requiring marketing to cover thousands of product pages, social media sites and more.
Tracking them all requires an inhuman amount of marketing to keep it up to date among this growing range of sources.
“AI Marketer finds earned media opportunities, proactively refreshes stale content, conducts competitive analysis, analyzes paid ads performance and even launches new ads,” the company said.
AI ensuring a smooth workflow in CPG
AI is also playing an increasing role in decision-making behind the scenes with companies like Opply, which helps manage critical operations connected to sourcing, procurement, financing and supply chains.
The recent funding round led by Chalfen Ventures with participation from Index Ventures, Anthemis, Entrepreneurs First, In This Together and Ventures Together.
“Its impact extends directly into real-world operations, from managing stock levels and coordinating production to ensuring deliveries run smoothly, enabling brands to scale faster and more efficiently,” the company said. “Customers including UK drinks innovator Agua de Madre and US kombucha brand RMBR are demonstrating the transformative potential of its technology, with results including cost reductions of 40% and a 12-fold return on investment in just 12 months.”
Founded in 2021 by Helen Murphy and Martin Postel, the company aims to simplify operational complexity and enable brands to grow faster.
“Our AI technology doesn’t just tell brands what needs to be done. It does the work, managing everything from sourcing and procurement to payments and supply chains,” Murphy said. “This latest funding gives us the opportunity to bring that model to many more businesses, from ambitious emerging brands to major global players.”
