The agentic-AI company teaching retail catalogs to write themselves - and stay found across search engines, marketplaces and AI shopping.
Every online retailer faces the same unglamorous bottleneck: thousands of product pages, each one needing accurate, on-brand, search-friendly copy, and never enough hands to write it. The biggest brands solved this years ago with in-house AI. Everyone else fell behind. Ocula Technologies, a UK company founded in 2021, was built to close that gap - not by hiring more copywriters, but by putting a team of specialized AI agents to work alongside the systems retailers already run.
The premise is simple to state and hard to execute. Ocula sits next to a retailer's product information management (PIM) system, or takes a spreadsheet upload, and turns structured product data into production-ready copy and metadata. That content is then tuned for every channel a retailer sells through - its own site, third-party marketplaces, and the growing class of AI-powered shopping engines that answer a buyer's question before a search results page ever loads.
Search is changing shape. Shoppers increasingly ask an AI engine what to buy rather than scrolling a results page, and marketplaces enforce their own strict content rules. A product page that reads well to a human but is thin, stale or inconsistent to a machine simply disappears from the places buyers look. Ocula's founders describe the underlying failure bluntly: "the majority of retailers and brands globally fail to make profitable use of one of their greatest assets: data."
Ocula optimizes across three fronts that increasingly move together - SEO (search engines), AEO (answer engines) and GEO (generative engines). The goal is not a single well-crafted page but a whole catalog kept current, compliant and discoverable at once.
Our clients grow their eCommerce traffic and revenue in ways they never imagined possible.
Fills gaps in product data and structures catalog information so it is ready for generation and distribution.
Generates thousands of on-brand, SEO-optimized descriptions and metadata at speed, with multi-language support.
Automates quality checks for brand tone, accuracy and marketplace compliance before content ships.
Coordinates the workflow end to end, routing content through enrichment, writing and QA across channels.
Tracks how content performs and drives proactive refreshes and seasonal updates based on results.
No rip-and-replace. Ocula plugs into existing product data or a simple spreadsheet upload.
PIM data or spreadsheet in.
Missing data filled and structured.
On-brand copy, checked automatically.
Tuned per channel, tracked, refreshed.
Plenty of tools can write a product description. What separates Ocula is the surrounding machinery: native integration with a retailer's PIM, an automated QA layer that enforces brand voice and marketplace rules, multi-channel optimization, and performance tracking that keeps content from going stale. Competitors range from horizontal AI writers like Jasper to retail-specific players such as Lily AI, Describely, Salsify and Akeneo - but Ocula's bet is on the full agentic pipeline rather than a single writing step.
Ocula works with mid-market and enterprise retailers with large catalogs - a mix that stretches from British high-street names to a US football franchise.
Ocula is B2B SaaS. It sells subscription software that integrates with a retailer's PIM or accepts spreadsheet uploads, generating and optimizing content at scale. Value scales with catalog size, the number of channels covered, and the ecommerce performance gains it drives. Estimated annual revenue sits around $2M, with a team of roughly 26.
Ocula's founders built the company after watching vendors overpromise and underdeliver on AI. That origin - being let down first - shaped a product aimed at democratizing capabilities the largest retailers already had. The funding followed. In August 2024 Ocula secured £3.25M led by Praetura Ventures, with Castelnau Group and Lloyds Banking Group participating. Two months later it closed a £4M Series A from NYO Capital and industry figure Jose Luis Gomes - NYO's first-ever European investment, earmarked in part for US expansion.
Bringing in industry experts like NYO and Jose is testament to what we have developed and how much potential people can see in our AI product.
Thomas McKenna, Gregory Fletcher and Gerry Buggy launch the company across Belfast and London.
Recognized by Retail Tech Insights among leading UK retail technology startups.
With participation from Castelnau Group and Lloyds Banking Group.
NYO Capital and Jose Luis Gomes back the round as Ocula launches its AI-powered ecommerce content solution.
Ocula sits at the intersection of three fast-moving markets: retail technology, ecommerce content operations, and the reshaping of search by generative AI. Its leadership brings a data-and-analytics background from firms that spend their days turning retail data into decisions - useful pedigree for a product whose whole thesis is making product data profitable. As AI shopping assistants mature, the company is positioned in the layer that decides whether a product shows up in an AI's answer at all.
Between the PIM (where product data lives) and the storefront/marketplace (where it must perform) - the content and optimization layer that has traditionally been manual.
SEO, AEO and GEO are converging. Catalogs are bigger, channels are stricter, and machines increasingly decide discoverability. Manual content operations can't keep pace.
Ocula uses agentic AI to generate, enrich and optimize ecommerce product content - descriptions, metadata and catalog data - at scale, keeping products discoverable across search engines, marketplaces and AI shopping engines.
Ocula was founded in 2021 by Thomas McKenna (CEO), Gregory Fletcher and Gerry Buggy, with roots in Belfast and London.
Ocula raised £3.25M in August 2024 and a £4M Series A in October 2024, backed by Praetura Ventures, NYO Capital, Jose Luis Gomes, Castelnau Group and Lloyds Banking Group.
Named clients include AO, Boots, Coty, Hornby Hobbies, Blain's Farm & Fleet, Castore, The Wedding Shop and the Kansas City Chiefs.
It is purpose-built for ecommerce: it integrates with a retailer's PIM, enforces brand tone and marketplace compliance through a QA agent, and optimizes for SEO, AEO and GEO across every sales channel rather than producing generic copy.