Covalo, located in Zurich, has secured an additional €3.5M in funding.

      The Zurich platform, which links over 1,500 ingredient suppliers and 6,000 brands, including Givaudan, Symrise, PUIG, and La Prairie, is transforming from a discovery marketplace into a data backbone that integrates directly with suppliers’ PIM systems and brands’ R&D processes. Hi inov led the investment round.

      Covalo, the Zurich-based platform that connects personal care ingredient suppliers with brands, has obtained a €3.5 million funding extension led by Hi inov, with current investors HTGF and seed + speed Ventures reinvesting.

      Founded in 2021 by Yann Chilvers and Timo von Bargen, who act as Co-Founders and Co-CEOs, the platform now connects more than 1,500 suppliers and 6,000 brands across over 145 countries, including clients such as Givaudan, Symrise, PUIG, and La Prairie.

      This funding signifies a shift in ambition. Covalo started as a marketplace for ingredient discovery, functioning as a search engine for formulators to locate raw materials, and quickly grew to become one of the largest platforms in this domain, with more than 80,000 ingredients available.

      The latest funding round is focused on a fundamentally different goal: establishing Covalo as the shared data infrastructure for the entire personal care industry, directly integrating with suppliers’ product information management (PIM) systems and brands’ R&D and product lifecycle management (PLM) workflows.

      The aim is to eliminate the reliance on emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets that currently dominate the movement of ingredient data in the industry, replacing it with a unified structured layer that can be written once and accessed universally.

      Urgency is driven by regulatory and market pressures. The EU Green Deal, microplastics regulations, sustainability demands, and rapidly evolving consumer expectations are all shortening reformulation timelines.

      Covalo estimates that by 2030, nearly 80% of products will need reformulation, which would significantly increase the volume and complexity of ingredient data that teams must manage.

      Currently, taking a product to market takes an average of three to five years, with roughly half of launches failing, according to Covalo. Without a unified, structured data foundation, the company argues that scaling AI integration across product development workflows becomes “nearly impossible.”

      The emphasis is on the quality of data before it becomes an AI issue: the effectiveness of models depends largely on the quality of the data they utilize.

      Covalo has been progressing in this direction for some time. In October 2024, the company announced a partnership with Trace One, a global PLM and compliance platform, integrating Covalo’s ingredient database directly into Trace One’s product development processes.

      The €3.5 million funding extension will support the next phase: enhancing the data platform, strengthening integrations, and developing AI capabilities that will operate on a structured, industry-wide data foundation. According to the company, their largest clients are increasing their usage two to three times annually.