Exclusive: Danish AI startup Cernel raises €4 million in four weeks to “build foundational infrastructure for agentic commerce”

Cernel, an Aarhus-based startup developing an AI-driven platform for the intelligent management of e-commerce data, today announced a €4 million Seed round to “build the foundational infrastructure for agentic commerce”. 

According to Cernel, the round was led by Seed Capital, alongside a group of prominent serial entrepreneurs with experience in building global billion-dollar businesses. The company claims that it closed this round in just four weeks.

“We are seeing demand that surpasses our wildest expectations. Companies are drowning in product data. Our AI removes the bottlenecks that previously strangled growth. With Seed Capital’s backing, we have the muscles to move beyond the Nordics and define the future of global e-commerce,” said Andreas Busch, the 25-year-old CEO and co-founder of Cernel. 

Cernel was founded in 2023 by Andreas Busch, Magnus Bruun Rasmussen, Mathias Fenger, and Jacob Lillelund. The company notes that its founders walked away from their degrees at Aarhus University to solve a trillion-dollar problem: the manual bottleneck of e-commerce data. 

The Danish startup has built an AI-native platform that automates the entire product data pipeline for e-commerce companies. It ingests raw supplier data, enriches it with verified attributes from brand databases and product registries, generates descriptions in the right tone of voice across multiple languages, creates lifestyle imagery, and formats everything for each sales channel. 

“In a commerce landscape increasingly mediated by AI agents, unstructured product data has become the biggest liability. Most e-commerce catalogues today remain trapped in manual spreadsheets, leaving them invisible to the search engines and recommendation systems of the future,” the company mentioned in the press release. 

Cernel claims to bridge this gap by converting fragmented product info into structured, AI-ready assets. The company states that it is moving beyond simple automation to build the foundational infrastructure for agentic commerce, where AI agents increasingly research, negotiate, and purchase on behalf of consumers and businesses. According to Cernel, its platform provides the “reasoning layer” required for retail data to be machine-executable at scale.

“At Seed Capital, we look for founders who don’t just use AI, but redefine how an entire industry operates. Andreas and the Cernel team have moved with incredible speed to build a true reasoning layer for commerce. We believe they will provide the infrastructure that will power the next decade of global retail,” said Geeta Schmidt, GP at Seed Capital.

In 2024, Cernel raised €765k in a pre-Seed funding round led by early-stage Danish VC Founderment, with participation from Denmark´s Export and Investment fund (EIFO), as well as business angels, including Stefan Rosenlund, Anders Thorhauge Sandholm, Kresten Krab Thorup, Jesper Hvejsel, and Mikkel Salling. 

Cernel is already used by e-commerce brands across fashion, beauty, sporting goods, and home and furniture,  including brands such as Matas, Firtal, Hummel, and Vero Moda. 

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