Founded just months ago by two repeat Y Combinator founders and a retail veteran, Lemrock is betting that AI agents are becoming the new storefront, and that brands are nowhere near ready for it.
When you ask ChatGPT or Perplexity which running shoes to buy, someone has to make sure the right brands show up, the prices are correct, and the purchase can actually be completed.
Lemrock, a Paris-based startup founded in 2025, is building that middleware, and it has just raised €6 million ($7 million) to deploy it.
The round was led by Galion.exe, the seed fund backed by a community of over 400 French tech founders. Joining the round is a roster of retail-smart angels: Michaël Benabou, a co-founder of Veepee (formerly Vente-Privée, one of France’s defining e-commerce success stories); Gary Anssens, founder of online cycling retailer Alltricks, which was acquired by Decathlon in 2019; Frédéric Halley, a retail tech investor; Emmanuelle Brizay, a tech and retail investor; and Antoine Lizée from Alan, the French health insurance scaleup.
Critically, Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, the co-founder of Criteo, the Paris-born adtech giant that took programmatic advertising mainstream, not only invested via his role on Galion.exe’s investment committee, but joins Lemrock’s board of directors.
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Lemrock’s premise is straightforward: e-commerce is migrating from search engines and brand websites into conversational AI interfaces, and the infrastructure brands need to sell in that environment does not yet exist.
The startup offers a single integration point connecting a retailer’s product catalogue to major AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, handling real-time pricing and availability, transaction processing, and performance tracking in one stack. Brands maintain control over their data, pricing, and how their products are presented.
The opportunity the founders are targeting is a structural one. According to Lemrock, some retailers are already experiencing traffic declines of up to 30% as consumers shift from Google searches to AI agent queries.
The logic follows: if the customer is no longer coming to your website, you need to be present and transactable where the customer actually is.
“Conversational commerce reverses the logic: it’s no longer the customer searching for the product; it’s the right product coming to the right customer,” said Roxane Laigle, Lemrock’s CEO.
“Our technology allows brands to sell better, and consumers to buy better, faster, more fairly, and with less friction.”
Lemrock was co-founded by three people with complementary CVs that map almost perfectly to the problem. Laigle brings over a decade of B2C growth and retail experience, with a background at Fnac Darty. CPO Sasha Collin and CTO Clément Nguyen are both veterans of Y Combinator’s S24 batch, where they co-founded Mindely, an AI-powered interviewing platform.
Collin previously spent three years at QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI division; Nguyen has a background in adtech and retailtech, with experience at Rakuten Advertising. The company is legally registered as Lemrock AI SAS, incorporated in December 2025, and is based near Paris.
Lemrock has also been selected for Agoranov, one of Europe’s leading deeptech incubators, adding institutional validation to the team’s credentials.
The wider context is a crowded but nascent space. Perplexity has been building out commerce features of its own, and a number of early-stage startups, including New Era of Shopping out of Budapest and San Francisco,are targeting similar ground.
What Lemrock is pitching is a vendor-neutral middleware layer rather than a competing storefront: one integration, multiple AI platforms, brand-safe by design.
