Azoma, a startup that measures and improves how AI shopping agents discover and recommend products, said on September 18 that it has taken an investment from dunnhumby ventures, the venture arm of retail data company dunnhumby, to build out what it calls an agentic commerce optimization platform. Azoma already works with L’Oreal, Unilever, and Mars, and the release did not disclose the investment amount. The category Azoma is building for did not really exist two years ago: measuring whether an AI shopping assistant recommends your product at all, and why, when the assistant is pulling from sources a brand does not control.

That last point is the part CDP and analytics teams should sit with. Per the release, AI shopping agents currently cite earned and social media for the large majority of their product answers, 86.5 percent for Alexa and 76 percent for Walmart’s Sparky, rather than pulling from brand-owned content. “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. That is a measurement gap most brands’ current martech stacks were never built to close, since attribution and CDP tooling generally assumes a buyer interacts with the brand’s own properties somewhere along the path. AI visibility has already become its own martech discipline on the search side, and this data suggests commerce agents are the next front it has to cover.

The original insight: this is the same visibility problem SEO and AEO teams have fought over search and AI-answer engines, now showing up a layer downstream in actual purchase recommendations, so the “AI visibility” budget line is likely to expand from search into commerce agents specifically. This publication has already tracked the infrastructure quietly running AI checkout, and Azoma’s raise signals that the measurement layer for it is becoming its own funded category. “Agentic commerce is a $9 trillion opportunity,” said Max Sinclair, Azoma’s CEO and co-founder, a claim that will draw more scrutiny as vendors chase the same gap.

Source: GlobeNewswire