Connecting more than 1,500 ingredient suppliers and 6,000 brands, including Givaudan, Symrise, PUIG and La Prairie, the Zurich platform transforms from a discovery marketplace into a database that connects directly to suppliers’ PIM systems and brands’ R&D workflows. Hi inov led the circuit.
HobbledThe Zurich-based platform that connects personal care ingredient suppliers with brands has secured €3.5 million in funding led by Hi inov, with reinvestment from existing investors HTGF and seed + speed Ventures.
The company was founded in 2021 by Yann Chilvers and Timo von Bargen, who act as co-founders and CEOs. In five years, the platform has connected more than 1,500 suppliers and 6,000 brands in 145+ countries with customers including Givaudan, Symrise, PUIG and La Prairie.
Funding marks a turning point in ambition. Launched as a marketplace for Covalo ingredient discoverywas a search engine of sorts for formulators to find raw materials, and has grown to become one of the largest platforms of its kind, listing more than 80,000 ingredients.
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The new round is focused on something structurally different: making Covalo a shared data infrastructure for the entire personal care industry, connecting directly to 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 information moves across the industry with a single structured layer that can be written once and read anywhere.
The urgency comes from regulatory and market pressure. The EU Green Deal, microplastics regulations, sustainability requirements and rapidly changing consumer expectations are all pushing reform timetables.
Covalo estimates that by 2030, approximately 80% of products will need reformulation, creating a huge increase in the volume and complexity of ingredient data that teams must manage.
According to Kovalo, it now takes an average of 3-5 years to bring a product to market, with half of launches failing. Without a shared, structured database, adopting AI across product development workflows at scale becomes, in the company’s words, “nearly impossible.”
The argument is a data quality argument before an AI argument: models can only be as good as the data they work with.
Covalo has been moving in this direction for some time. In October 2024, it announced a partnership with Trace One, a global PLM and compliance platform that integrates Covalo’s ingredient database directly into Trace One’s product development workflows.
The €3.5 million expansion funds the next phase: scaling this data platform, deepening integrations and creating artificial intelligence capabilities that sit on top of a structured, industry-wide database. The platform’s largest customers expand their usage two to three times a year, according to the company.
