The Zurich platform, linking over 1,500 ingredient suppliers and 6,000 brands, including Givaudan, Symrise, PUIG, and La Prairie, is transitioning from a discovery marketplace into a direct data connection hub integrating with suppliers’ PIM systems and brands’ R&D workflows. This funding round was led by Hi inov.
Covalo, a Zurich-based platform linking personal care ingredient suppliers with brands, has acquired a €3.5 million funding extension led by Hi inov, with additional investments from existing contributors HTGF and seed + speed Ventures.
The company, established in 2021 by Co-Founders and Co-CEOs Yann Chilvers and Timo von Bargen, now connects more than 1,500 suppliers and 6,000 brands across 145+ countries, serving clients like Givaudan, Symrise, PUIG, and La Prairie.
This funding signals a shift in objectives. Initially launched as a marketplace for ingredient discovery, functioning as a search engine for formulators to source raw materials, Covalo has evolved into one of the largest platforms of its kind, offering over 80,000 ingredients.
This round aims for a structural transformation: evolving Covalo into the shared data infrastructure for the personal care industry, connecting directly with suppliers’ PIM systems and brands’ R&D and PLM workflows.
The intention is to replace the emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets currently prevalent for ingredient data transfer with a unified structured layer, allowing information to be written once and accessed universally.
The urgency is fueled by regulatory and market demands. EU Green Deal initiatives, microplastics regulations, sustainability criteria, and rapidly changing consumer expectations are all narrowing reformulation timelines.
Covalo projects that by 2030, around 80% of products will require reformulation, significantly escalating the volume and intricacy of ingredient data management for teams.
Bringing a product to market currently averages three to five years, with half of launches failing, as per Covalo. Without a shared, structured data platform, large-scale AI adoption for product development workflows becomes, as the company states, “nearly impossible.”
This argument prioritizes data quality over AI: models can only perform as well as the data they process.
Covalo has been progressing towards this goal for some time. In October 2024, it entered a partnership with Trace One, a global PLM and compliance platform, to integrate Covalo’s ingredient database directly into Trace One’s product development workflows.
The €3.5 million extension is funding the next phase: expanding the data platform, enhancing integrations, and developing AI capabilities that will operate atop a structured, industry-wide data foundation. According to the company, its largest customers are expanding their use two to three times annually.