AI startup Ecomtent has secured £650,000 in pre-seed funding to develop its technology for eCommerce.
The startup, conceived during a Techstars accelerator program in Toronto, is led by Briton Max Sinclair, who has lived in London his whole life and continues to be based there.
Sinclair spent six years at Amazon working on strategic initiatives, including the launch of Amazon in Singapore and launch of Amazon Grocery across the EU. His co-founder Timur Luguev is a PhD & postdoctoral researcher in machine learning.
Ecomtent’s technology enables sellers and retailers to generate visual and written content optimised explicitly for AI-powered search across large catalogues at scale, saving weeks of manual work and reducing bottlenecks on internal content teams and external agencies.
The funding was led by MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund (IAF), and includes Techstars x eBay Ventures, C-Suite Angels from Retailers, and Senior leadership from the Tech industry.
“eCommerce is about to change fundamentally,” said CEO Sinclair. “Generative AI will completely transform how consumers shop online, with conversational-style search poised to become the new normal.
“The current best SEO practices will look completely outdated in just 12 months. Longtail keyword matching is dead, and the future will be matching customer intent across both written and visual assets.”
The company has already made significant strides in the market, completing successful pilots with major retailers, including two with annual revenues of $11 billion and $14 billion, respectively.
It says these achievements have quickly positioned Ecomtent as a go-to solution within the Amazon Seller and Amazon Agency communities, enabling these customers to generate high-quality lifestyle images, infographics, A+ Content, and optimised copy at scale.
Vincenzo Toscano, CEO of full-service Amazon and Walmart agency Ecomcy, said: “I have been incredibly impressed with Ecomtent’s technology, which has augmented our internal content team’s speed and scale to be 10x more productive.”