Covalo raises €3.5M to become the shared data infrastructure for an industry where 80% of products will need reformulating by 2030

The Zurich platform, which connects 1,500+ ingredient suppliers and 6,000 brands including Givaudan, Symrise, PUIG, and La Prairie, is evolving from a discovery marketplace into a data backbone that plugs directly into suppliers’ PIM systems and brands’ R&D workflows. Hi inov led the round.

Covalo, the Zurich-based platform connecting personal care ingredient suppliers with brands, has secured a €3.5 million funding extension led by Hi inov, with existing investors HTGF and seed + speed Ventures re-investing.

The company was founded in 2021 by Yann Chilvers and Timo von Bargen, who serve as Co-Founders and Co-CEOs. Five years in, the platform connects more than 1,500 suppliers and 6,000 brands across 145+ countries, with clients including Givaudan, Symrise, PUIG, and La Prairie.

The funding marks a pivot in ambition. Covalo launched as a marketplace for ingredient discovery, a kind of search engine for formulators to find raw materials, and became one of the largest platforms of its kind, with more than 80,000 ingredients listed.

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The new round is aimed at something structurally different: turning Covalo into the shared data infrastructure for the entire personal care industry, connecting directly into suppliers’ product information management (PIM) systems and brands’ R&D and product lifecycle management (PLM) workflows.

The goal is to replace the emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets that still dominate how ingredient data moves through the industry with a single structured layer that can be written once and read everywhere.

The case for urgency is driven by regulatory and market pressure. The EU Green Deal, microplastics regulations, sustainability requirements, and fast-changing consumer expectations are all compressing reformulation timelines.

Covalo estimates that by 2030, approximately 80% of products will require reformulation, a figure that would generate an enormous increase in the volume and complexity of ingredient data teams need to manage.

Getting a product to market already takes three to five years on average, with half of launches failing, according to Covalo. Without a shared, structured data foundation, adopting AI across product development workflows at scale becomes, in the company’s words, “nearly impossible.”

The argument is a data quality argument before it is an AI argument: the models can only be as good as the data they run on.

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

The €3.5 million extension funds the next phase: scaling that data platform, deepening integrations, and building out the AI capabilities that will sit on top of a structured, industry-wide data foundation. The platform’s largest customers, per the company, are expanding their use two to three times year over year.