Harmonya Inc., a startup that’s enhancing consumer packaged goods and retail data with artificial intelligence to provide companies with fresh insights, said it has closed on a $20 million early-stage round of funding.

Today’s Series A round was led by Bright Pixel Capital and saw participation from Team8, Arc Investors, J Ventures, Silicon Road Ventures, Allen & Co., LiveRamp Ventures and Susa Ventures, bringing the company’s total amount raised to $25 million.

The startup has built an AI-powered product data enrichment, categorization and insights platform for retailers and brands. Its platform uses generative AI technology made famous by OpenAI LP and ChatGPT to surface product attributes from a variety of sources. Using the platform, product and marketing teams can identify consumer drivers of market performance, uncover category insights, optimize assortment and merchandising, generate insights to inspire innovation and automate product coding processes.

Harmonya reckons that many brands and retailers are being held back by their existing product data infrastructure, which it says is based on outdated, static models that do not enable granular understanding of individual products and what makes them sell.

“When a new consumer trend emerges, like sustainability or wellness, CPGs and retailers have to go over all of their existing products after the fact and manually add attributes to each one,” said Harmonya co-founder and Chief Executive Cem Kent. He explained that this severely limits companies’ ability to identify and respond to emerging consumer trends and preferences. It also hampers their ability to forecast demand accurately and create more personalized shopping experiences for customers, he said.

Harmonya said its platform can ingest information from millions of online product listings, creating unique tags from titles, descriptions, ingredients and consumer reviews. The core of its platform is focused on the granular mapping of products and their related, dynamic concepts. Using this information, teams get more visibility into the performance drivers of both their own products, and also their competitors’ portfolios.

It turns up richer insights based on product categorizations and consumer perspectives, which can then inform strategy and execution, enabling teams to make more informed decisions around marketing, category management, ecommerce and innovation. In addition, marketers can use Harmonya’s data to tell more engaging stories about their products and brands, the company said.

The startup counts four of the global top ten CPGs as its customers, including PepsiCo Inc., as well as many other large retailers in the U.S. It says it has grown its customer base rapidly this year, and serves data teams both at its customers’ central headquarters as well as specific teams that work directly with merchants and buyers.

Bright Pixel Capital’s Francisco Nunes said there are always new opportunities to innovate in the CPG and retail industries, especially in the area of product data. “Harmonya’s groundbreaking platform positions the company as a key player in unlocking the untapped potential within these industries, bringing them closer to how consumers perceive and experience products,” he said.

Kent said Harmonya will use the funding from today’s round to accelerate the development of the proprietary large language models that power its generative AI technology. It also plans to scale up its go-to-market operations to boost growth. “This investment will help us further our mission to bridge the gap between legacy product data, which lacks descriptive and diagnostic power and limits what organizations can do, and the modern need for a dynamic product language to power more impactful analytics and decision-making,” he said.

Image: Harmonya