Covalo has secured a €3.5 million funding extension to accelerate its transition from an ingredient discovery marketplace into a foundational data infrastructure platform for the personal care industry. The round was led by Hi inov, with participation from existing investors HTGF and seed + speed Ventures.
Founded five years ago, Covalo initially focused on simplifying how beauty and personal care companies discover ingredients. The company is now expanding its mission to address a larger structural challenge across the industry: fragmented and inefficient data systems that slow innovation and increase complexity across product development.
Today, Covalo connects more than 1,500 suppliers and 6,000 brands across over 145 countries, including major industry players such as Givaudan, Symrise, PUIG, and La Prairie. The company is positioning itself as a centralized data backbone that integrates directly into suppliers’ product information management systems and brands’ R&D and product lifecycle management workflows.
The need for such infrastructure stems from the growing complexity of product development. A single cosmetic product can involve dozens of ingredients, each accompanied by extensive documentation related to safety, compliance, sustainability, and performance. This data is often stored in disconnected formats such as PDFs, spreadsheets, and emails, forcing teams to manually manage and reconcile information across departments.
At the same time, the industry is facing increasing regulatory pressure, sustainability requirements, and supply chain challenges. With an estimated 80% of products expected to require reformulation by 2030, the volume and complexity of ingredient data are set to increase significantly. Without a standardized and shared data foundation, scaling AI-driven workflows and digital transformation efforts remains difficult.
Covalo’s platform aims to solve this by structuring ingredient data once and enabling it to be reused across teams and organizations. This approach is designed to improve efficiency across R&D, regulatory, and procurement functions while reducing duplication of effort.
The new funding will support the expansion of Covalo’s enterprise offering, the development of AI-driven tools such as workflow automation and data enrichment, and the introduction of advanced capabilities including product information management and master data management. The company also plans to deepen its presence in the personal care sector before expanding into adjacent industries.
As the industry becomes increasingly data-driven, Covalo is positioning itself as a critical infrastructure layer that enables more connected, efficient, and scalable product development processes.
KEY QUOTES
“On average, it takes 3-5 years to bring a product to market. At the end of this process, 50% of product launches fail, costing the industry hundreds of billions every year. Much of this inefficiency stems from how information is managed and shared throughout the product lifecycle; product data is the one data that flows across the entire process. The problem is that this process is highly fragmented and inefficient on an industry level. Many companies are trying to find internal solutions to address these challenges, but what they truly need is one common data backbone that powers the industry and allows for seamless data flows across teams and partners. Covalo is that backbone.”
Yann Chilvers, Co-Founder And Co-CEO, Covalo
“Five years ago, we built the world’s largest ingredient discovery platform. What we’ve learned is that discovery is just the beginning – what the industry needs is a shared system of record where ingredient data is structured once, governed once, and reused everywhere. Our largest customers are expanding their use of the platform two- to three-fold year over year, not because we’re selling harder, but because once data is structured on Covalo, teams across R&D, regulatory, and procurement all want access. That compounding effect is something no standalone tool can replicate.”
Timo Von Bargen, Co-Founder And Co-CEO, Covalo
