When keyword search is the reason a sale is lost

Most online stores still run on search boxes built for a different era of retail. Product catalogs are frequently incomplete or inconsistently labeled, and the keyword matching underneath most eCommerce search engines has no way to compensate. A shopper who types a natural request, something closer to how they would describe what they want to a person in a store, gets back a list of near misses instead of an answer. The result is frustration for the shopper and, for the retailer, lower conversion and lost revenue on traffic that was already there and already looking to buy. As online catalogs grow larger and messier, the gap between how people actually search and what conventional engines can understand keeps widening.

Teaching search to work the way a shop assistant does

Kimera Technologies builds its engine around a different premise: search should be able to interpret language, images, and context together, not just match strings of text. The platform combines natural language understanding, computer vision, and a conversational layer so it can read a query like “an afternoon wedding and I want a black dress” or “a fragrance-free serum for sensitive skin,” ask a clarifying question if it needs one, and guide the shopper to the right products even when the underlying catalog data is thin. Because the system reasons at the level of meaning rather than tags, it can still produce relevant results from product listings that were never cleanly labeled in the first place. It is designed to drop into existing storefronts with minimal engineering work, with integrations built for platforms including Shopify, Magento, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, and LogiCommerce.

From a Valencia lab to a growing retail footprint

Founded in Valencia, Spain in June 2021, Kimera came out of the Lanzadera startup accelerator. Its product is a conversational search and discovery layer for eCommerce, built on computer vision work that turns visual content, images and video, into searchable, taggable business data, and it serves retailers across categories including fashion, cosmetics, sportswear, and home goods.

Co-chief executives, with an AI doctorate behind the product

It was co-founded by Álvaro Igual and Carles Igual, who both serve as co-CEOs, alongside Luis Llusiá as CFO. Carles Igual holds a doctorate in artificial intelligence from the Universitat Politècnica de València, and the founding group combines that research background with commercial and finance experience built up before Kimera.

Backing the team from pre-seed onward

We first backed Kimera in its pre-seed round, a €660,000 raise alongside Addendum Capital, Bonsai Partners, BStartup by Banco Sabadell, and a group of angel investors including Lanai Partners, Toubkal Partners, and Juanjo Mostazo. We have continued to back the company since, leading a seed round of more than €2 million in October 2025, alongside continued participation from Bonsai Partners and Addendum Capital, plus support from public funding initiatives. That seed capital is going toward accelerating the rollout of Kimera's conversational search engine, expanding into additional European and Latin American markets, and deepening the underlying multimodal AI, alongside further integrations with eCommerce platforms.

We think the future of online product discovery looks like this: natural, contextual, and conversational rather than keyword-bound, and we back Álvaro, Carles, Luis, and the rest of the Kimera team in bringing that experience to more retailers.