Founded a few months ago by two repeat Y Combinator founders and a retail veteran, Lemrock is betting that artificial intelligence agents are becoming the new storefront, and that brands aren’t ready for it.
when asked ChatGPT or Confused about which running shoes to buy, someone needs to make sure the right brands are visible, the prices are right, and the purchase can actually be completed.
LemrockFounded in 2025, the Paris-based startup is building that middleware and has just raised 6 million euros ($7 million) to deploy it.
The round was led by Galion.exe, a seed fund backed by a community of over 400 French tech founders. This round features a roster of smart retail angels: Michaël Benabou, co-founder of Veepee (formerly Vente-Privée, one of France’s defining e-commerce success stories); Gary Anssens, founder of Alltrics, an online bike retailer acquired by Decathlon in 2019; Frédéric Halley, retail technology investor; Emmanuelle Brizay, technology and retail investor; and Antoine Lizée Alan, scaled up French health insurance.
Critically, Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, co-founder of Paris-based ad tech giant Criteo, which focuses on programmatic advertising, not only invested through his role on Galion.exe’s investment committee, but also joined Lemrock’s board of directors.
Lemrock’s premise is simple: e-commerce is moving from search engines and brand websites to conversational AI interfaces, and the infrastructure that brands need to sell in this environment doesn’t yet exist.
The startup offers a single point of integration that connects a retailer’s product catalog to major AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, managing real-time pricing and availability, transaction processing and performance tracking into a single stack. Brands control their information, pricing and how their products are presented.
The opportunity the founders are targeting is structure. According to Lemrock, some retailers are already experiencing traffic drops of up to 30% as consumers switch from Google searches to AI agent queries.
The logic is this: if a customer is no longer coming to your website, you need to be available and actionable where the customer is.
“Conversational commerce reverses the logic: it is no longer the customer looking for the product, but the right product to the right customer” said Roxane Laigle, CEO of Lemrock.
“Our technology enables brands to sell better and consumers to buy better, faster, fairer and with less friction.”
Lemrock was founded by three people with complementary resumes that mirrored the challenge almost perfectly. Laigle brings over a decade of B2C growth and retail experience with experience at Fnac Darty. CPO Sasha Collin and CTO Clément Nguyen are both veterans of Y Combinator’s S24 batch, where they co-founded Mindely, an AI-powered interviewing platform.
Collin previously spent three years at QuantumBlack, the AI division of McKinsey; Nguyen has experience in adtech and retailtech, with experience at Rakuten Advertising. The company is legally registered as Lemrock AI SAS, was founded in December 2025 and is located near Paris.
Lemrock has also been selected for Agoranov, one of Europe’s leading deep technology incubators, adding institutional approval to the team’s credentials.
The larger context is a crowded but emerging space. Confusion is developing its own commerce features, and a number of early-stage startups, including New Shopping Cycle from Budapest and San Francisco, are aiming for similar goals.
What Lemrock offers is not a competing storefront, but a vendor-neutral middleware layer: one integration, multiple AI platforms, brand-safe by design.
