Covalo Secures €3.5M in Extended Funding Round
▼ Summary
– Covalo, a Zurich-based platform connecting personal care ingredient suppliers and brands, has secured a €3.5 million funding extension led by Hi inov.
– The platform, founded in 2021, has evolved from a discovery marketplace into shared data infrastructure that integrates directly with suppliers’ and brands’ internal systems.
– This shift aims to replace fragmented data exchange (like emails and PDFs) with a single structured layer to manage ingredient information.
– The change is driven by regulatory pressures and market demands, with an estimated 80% of products needing reformulation by 2030.
– The funding will scale this data platform and build AI capabilities, relying on improved data quality to enable efficient product development.
A Zurich-based platform that connects the personal care industry has secured a €3.5 million funding extension to accelerate its transformation into a centralized data infrastructure. Covalo, which links over 1,500 ingredient suppliers with 6,000 brands globally, will use the capital to scale its platform and build out new AI capabilities. The investment round was led by Hi inov, with continued participation from existing backers HTGF and seed + speed Ventures.
Founded in 2021 by Co-CEOs Yann Chilvers and Timo von Bargen, Covalo began as a specialized discovery marketplace. It quickly grew into one of the sector’s largest platforms, listing more than 80,000 ingredients for clients that include major players like Givaudan, Symrise, PUIG, and La Prairie. The new funding signals a strategic shift from being a search tool to becoming the industry’s essential data backbone.
The company’s core ambition is to replace the fragmented, manual processes that still govern ingredient data exchange. Emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets create inefficiencies and errors. Covalo’s solution is to establish a single, structured data layer that integrates directly with suppliers’ product information management (PIM) systems and brands’ R&D and product lifecycle management (PLM) workflows. This allows information to be written once and accessed universally, streamlining collaboration.
Powerful market forces are driving the need for this transformation. Regulatory pressure from initiatives like the EU Green Deal and new microplastics rules, combined with rising sustainability requirements and shifting consumer demands, are forcing brands to reformulate products faster than ever. Covalo estimates that by 2030, roughly 80% of personal care products will need to be reformulated, creating an unprecedented surge in data complexity.
The current product development cycle is already lengthy and risky, taking an average of three to five years with a 50% failure rate for new launches. According to the company, scaling AI across these workflows is nearly impossible without a unified, high-quality data foundation. The logic is clear: artificial intelligence models are only as effective as the data they analyze. Improving data quality is therefore a prerequisite for any meaningful AI adoption.
Covalo has been building toward this vision. A key step was a partnership announced in October 2024 with Trace One, a global PLM platform, which integrated Covalo’s ingredient database directly into product development environments. The new funding will fuel the next phase: scaling this integrated data platform, deepening such connections, and developing the AI tools that will leverage this structured foundation. The platform’s largest customers are reportedly expanding their usage two to threefold annually, indicating strong market traction for this integrated approach.
(Source: The Next Web)