CommerceClarity, the AI-powered catalogue management platform used by enterprise retailers and brands including Prada, Stiga, Cisalfa Sport, Arcaplanet, Next Hardware & Software and Top Farmacia (Hippocrates Holding), has announced the acquisition of Katalogo.ai, a Barcelona-based start-up founded by Luca Cozzolino. As part of the deal, Cozzolino joins the CommerceClarity founding team as chief product officer.
The acquisition, the financial terms of which have not been disclosed, marks the company’s first M&A transaction, completed eighteen months after its founding and six months following a €2.7 million funding round led by Italian Founders Fund (Koinos Capital) and Entourage, with participation from Euregio+ (Alpine VC), Redstone, Vento, Vesper Holding, Ithaca Investments and business angels from the tech and AI sectors.
For a decade, the product catalogue has been an operational challenge: feeding the company’s own website and major marketplaces with sufficiently structured data. The advent of AI search and shopping bots is rewriting the rules of visibility: a product exists only if its data is readable by a machine that decides what to show the consumer. At the same time, the proliferation of channels, markets and compliance requirements has pushed catalogue management beyond the limits of manual sustainability.
The result is a product category in its own right: it is not a PIM, it is not a feed tool, and it is not a generic AI integration. It is a level of intelligence that captures catalogue data, structures it, enriches it and validates it in accordance with business rules. Those who build this over the next eighteen months will secure a lead that will be difficult to close, because they will be starting with better data.
CommerceClarity customers reduce their catalogue management costs by up to 90%, bring new products online in a matter of hours rather than weeks, and see an average increase of 30% in traffic and sales. This is not the result of a single deployment, but stems from the ongoing ability to keep the catalogue aligned with the business.
Katalogo.ai was developing styling agents for the retail catalogue – systems capable of analysing available products and generating outfit suggestions designed to encourage bundled sales. The product is concrete proof that CommerceClarity’s core premise – that the catalogue is a competitive asset, not merely an archive – also holds true in highly curated sectors such as fashion and lifestyle.
“We had identified the same problem from two different perspectives,” comments Federico Sargenti, co-founder and CEO of CommerceClarity (pictured on the right alongside Cozzolino), in a statement. “Luca had approached it from the merchant and platform side; we from the enterprise infrastructure side. The meeting wasn’t just one option among others; it was the quickest way to bring a vision we already shared to fruition.”
Cozzolino brings to the founding team a background that spans both sides of the market: a former merchant before becoming a product leader, he led product development at Shopify (the platform that defined SMB e-commerce) and at Zalando (the retailer that defined enterprise fashion e-commerce in Europe), with a stint at Perk in between: “I’d fallen in love with the problem, and so I built Katalogo.ai. When I met the CommerceClarity team, I realised two things: they had already won the trust of some of the most important brands and retailers, and there was a rare synergy between our skills. Joining forces was the quickest way to put my product vision at the service of an even greater ambition. The plan is to grow the team of builders with whom to create a product that will transform commerce over the next ten years.”
The acquisition coincides with the launch of CommerceClarity’s international expansion, with the UK as its first market outside Italy. Cozzolino’s base in Barcelona extends the company’s European footprint, whilst its headquarters remain in Milan.
The ‘software-as-a-service’ operating model, in which each client is supported by dedicated AI engineers who deploy agents for each use case, remains unchanged. “We don’t sell a licence; we sell a result,” adds Sargenti. “This is what enables us to work with enterprise clients who have complex product catalogues and internal processes. It is the model we will continue to scale.”
“Luca was independently developing the same thing as CommerceClarity in Barcelona. He and Daniele met for a coffee, which turned into a five-hour conversation. Both came to the same conclusion: Katalogo needed to be on a platform like CommerceClarity. When someone so talented, who is independently developing the same vision, decides that the platform’s strategy is the right one, it means the market is telling you something,” Irene Mingozzi, a partner at Italian Founders Fund who has believed in the project since the first round, tells Startupbusiness.
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