Introducing Octogen

For the past two decades, ecommerce has grown steadily, driven by rising consumer adoption, seamless online payments, more efficient logistics models, and the explosion of digital and social advertising. The shift to mobile accelerated that growth even further.

AI is poised to be the next generational platform shift in ecommerce, and potentially the biggest yet. It promises to unlock entirely new ways to discover, evaluate, and purchase products. It will create a fundamentally better shopping journey for consumers, and better economics for brands and retailers.

But there is a less obvious problem that limits both the speed and breadth of any of these innovations: retail product data is still messy, inconsistent, and fragmented.

At Octogen, we’re building towards the ultimate AI storefront. But first, we have to solve the data problem.

The Data Problem

AI needs to be grounded in reality. But the reality of ecommerce data is messy.

The data that powers ecommerce has no standard structure or shared ontology. Every retailer operates a bespoke stack: there is no common language that vendors use to describe products, orders, or users. Instead, every commerce site is a snowflake (Yes, even the ones on Shopify).

I’ve experienced this firsthand. I spent a decade as co-founder and CTO at Bluecore, building and scaling a unicorn ecommerce marketing automation platform.

At Bluecore, we had an entire engineering unit whose job was writing per-retailer custom integrations to ingest, normalize, and maintain an understanding of each retailer’s product data. Every catalog was structured differently. Every integration was custom. It worked, but it scaled linearly at best – each new client required more engineers and more maintenance.

AI Can Transform Shopping – But First, the Data Must Be Fixed

AI infrastructure for ecommerce must start with clean, structured, and richly annotated data.

Octogen’s technology ingests, structures, and enriches ecommerce data into a highly detailed common taxonomy. It is powered by agents that continuously learn and improve, requiring no lift from brands or retailers and zero marginal human labor.

We started with fashion and apparel because it is one of the most complex categories in ecommerce. It requires understanding visual variants, silhouettes and fits, sizes and measurements, fabrics, closures, and more. You can’t buy fashion from a simple spec sheet.

Cosimo

Cosimo is our first test product built on our data unification technology. Cosimo is an ecommerce discovery experience, demonstrating what becomes possible when product data is structured at scale for understanding. You can try it here.

What’s Next

AI traffic to retail sites grew 693% year over year in the 2025 holiday season. This is just the beginning.

We’re building solutions that make our technology available to brands, retailers, and AI agents for a world where ecommerce no longer lives on a single surface.

And if you’re interested in bringing your brand on board, get in touch. We’re adding new brands every week.

— Mahmoud

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