Ocula, a specialist in providing AI insights to eCommerce businesses, has raised £3.25 million in Series A investment.
Belfast-based Ocula has developed an AI tool, Ocula Boost, to help major brands such as Boots and AO.com convert more sales, improve their customer experience and decrease the time spent manually enhancing product pages.
With over 25 major customers today, the business plans to triple its client base over the next 24 months.
According to Ocula, the ongoing challenge facing online retailers is that product pages are not optimised when they go live, which means they lack key information, are inconsistent and are rarely set up for SEO success.
Ocula uses AI and large language models to enhance product pages, creating insight into the improvements that can be made and by auto-generating critical content, such as product descriptions.
The round was led by Praetura Ventures. It was supported by long-term investor Castelnau Group as well as Lloyds Banking Group and its FinTech investment team.
“We have created something special at Ocula from both a product and culture perspective,” said Thomas McKenna, Ocula co-founder and CEO.
“Users consistently tell us that our generative AI is levelling the playing field with their most advanced competitors. We’ve achieved this by bringing together some of the brightest science, engineering and product talent in the UK and beyond.
“This investment will see us go faster when it comes to UK and US expansion and deliver the next generation of exciting AI features to clients.”
Peter Carway, investment director at Praetura Ventures, added: “AI’s role within eCommerce has grown exponentially over the past several years.
“There’s now a wealth of incredibly exciting developments for retailers of all sizes, as proved by the work being done by Ocula.
“Having invested in this space before, we were drawn to Ocula’s proposition and suite of highly sophisticated products as well as the strength of Ocula’s co-founders Thomas and Gregory, who we’re looking forward to supporting with more than money.”
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