Covalo Raises €3.5M to Build Personal Care Data Platform

Key Takeaways

1. Zurich-based Covalo, a B2B ingredients discovery and data platform for personal care, has closed a €3.5 million Seed extension round led by Hi inov, with existing investors HTGF and seed + speed Ventures re-participating.
2. The platform now connects 1,500+ ingredient suppliers with 6,000+ brands across 145+ countries, listing over 80,000 ingredients and serving names like Givaudan, Symrise, PUIG, and La Prairie.
3. Platform engagement surged 84% in 2025, hitting 1.3 million monthly interactions, while Net Revenue Retention exceeded 145%, signalling strong expansion within existing clients.
4. With 80% of personal care products expected to require reformulation by 2030, driven by EU microplastics bans and sustainability rules, Covalo’s data infrastructure play is timed to a major regulatory inflection point.

Quick Recap

Zurich-based Covalo, one of the personal care industry’s largest ingredient discovery platforms, has officially announced a €3.5 million Seed extension to accelerate its transformation from a marketplace into the industry’s central data infrastructure layer. The round was led by Paris-based Hi inov, with continued support from HTGF (High-Tech Gründerfonds) and seed + speed Ventures, both of whom re-invested. The announcement coincides with Covalo’s fifth anniversary, marking a deliberate pivot from ingredient search to full-stack data backbone, as confirmed via the company’s official blog and corroborated by EU Startups.

Funding Focus: Building an Industry Operating System

Covalo was co-founded by Yann Chilvers and Timo von Bargen, both former executives at Clariant, one of the world’s largest specialty chemical companies. That pedigree matters: the founders built the company with an insider understanding of exactly where data breaks down in personal care product development cycles.

The fresh capital will be deployed across three pillars:

• Enterprise Expansion: Scaling the platform’s commercial footprint in priority markets across Europe and North America.
• AI Agents: Launching industry-specific AI tools including conversational analytics, RFI/RFP workflow automation, data extraction and enrichment, and regulatory compliance checks.
• Data Infrastructure Depth: Deepening the platform with full Product Information Management (PIM) and Master Data Management (MDM) capabilities that plug directly into supplier and brand systems.

Currently, Covalo integrates directly into suppliers’ PIM systems and brands’ R&D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) workflows. The practical effect is significant: when a supplier updates a compliance certificate on Covalo, every connected brand partner receives the update in real time, eliminating the email chains and PDF attachments that still dominate the industry. The company’s largest customers are reportedly expanding their usage two to three times year over year.

Regulation, Reformulation, and the Data Gap

The personal care industry is sitting on a data problem most outsiders never see. A single facial cream can involve dozens of raw materials, each carrying documentation across safety, regulatory compliance, sustainability, and technical specifications.

Co-founder Yann Chilvers has noted that, on average, it takes 3 to 5 years to bring a personal care product to market, and roughly 50% of product launches fail, with much of that inefficiency traced directly to how product data is managed and shared.

That problem is now colliding with a wave of hard regulatory deadlines. The EU’s Regulation (EU) 2023/2055, which restricts intentionally added synthetic polymer microplastics, is forcing widespread reformulation across the cosmetics sector:

• Rinse-off cosmetics: microplastic-free by October 2027
• Leave-on cosmetics and fragrance encapsulates: by October 2029
• Makeup, lip, and nail products: by October 2035

On top of that, the EU Green Deal and mounting sustainability requirements are accelerating the pace of portfolio overhaul. With 80% of products needing reformulation by 2030, brands and suppliers need a reliable, structured, real-time data layer to manage that transition without reinventing the wheel for every SKU. Covalo is positioning itself as exactly that layer.

The global personal care products market provides the commercial backdrop: valued at approximately $563 billion in 2026 and on track to reach $727 billion by 2031 at a 5.24% CAGR. The sustainable personal care segment alone, at $59 billion in 2026, is growing at 8.07% annually through 2034. Infrastructure that helps brands navigate sustainability and compliance at scale carries real economic weight in a market of that size.

Competitive Landscape

Covalo is not operating in a vacuum. Two players represent its most relevant competitive reference points in the B2B ingredient data space: UL Prospector (by UL Solutions) and Knowde (San Jose-based, Sequoia-backed). Here is how they stack up:

Strategic Read

Covalo’s competitive edge over UL Prospector lies in its active data infrastructure play: where Prospector remains a read-only search database for formulators, Covalo is building a two-way, write-and-sync layer that connects directly into operational workflows.

Knowde is Covalo’s more direct structural analog, given both are pursuing MDM and PIM integrations, but Knowde operates as a broad-industry generalist backed by $175 million and Sequoia Capital, while Covalo is a focused vertical specialist with deep personal care domain expertise and founder credibility from Clariant. Covalo wins on vertical depth and network quality in personal care; Knowde wins on scale, capital, and cross-industry applicability.

TechnoTrenz’s Takeaway

I will be direct: I think this is a quietly significant deal that deserves more attention than a €3.5 million round typically gets.

In my reading of the B2B SaaS landscape, the companies that win infrastructure-layer bets are rarely the ones with the flashiest AI demos. They are the ones that solve a boring-but-critical data plumbing problem at exactly the moment the industry has no choice but to fix it. Covalo is doing that. The 145% Net Revenue Retention figure is the number I keep coming back to: that is not a vanity metric. That tells me existing customers are not just staying, they are expanding, which in a B2B infrastructure product means the data integrations are actually working in production environments.

I generally prefer backing companies that have regulatory tailwinds doing part of the selling for them. The EU microplastics deadline, the Green Deal compliance push, and the sheer volume of reformulations coming by 2030 mean that every mid-to-large personal care brand will need exactly what Covalo is building whether they want to or not. That is a powerful demand driver that does not rely on discretionary tech budget cycles.