The Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) sector is undergoing rapid transformation as brands compete for visibility in increasingly competitive retail environments. Neurolabs, recently named the fastest-growing deeptech startup in the UK and Ireland with a 303% two-year revenue CAGR, is leading this revolution. The company pioneers enterprise-level Image Recognition as a Service (IRaaS), redefining retail execution through cutting-edge Visual AI powered by synthetic data and 3D digital twins.
Today, Neurolabs has secured a $7.8 million Series A funding round led by Nauta, with participation from LAUNCHub, Lunar Ventures, and Techstart, bringing total investment to over $12 million. This funding will accelerate Neurolabs’ mission to transform how CPG brands capture and act on in-store data, expand its computer vision engineering team, and strengthen its commercial presence across the UK, Europe, and the US.
“This funding accelerates our vision: applying synthetic data and Visual AI to solve the $800 billion problem of inefficiencies in CPG supply chains,” said Paul Pop, co-founder and CEO of Neurolabs. “We’re growing our computer vision engineering team and deepening our commercial footprint across the UK, European and US markets. Our platform is already a new benchmark for retail image recognition — this investment enables us to scale that impact globally.”
How Neurolabs challenges the limitations of traditional image recognition technology
Founded in 2018 by Paul Pop (CEO), Patric Fulop (CTO, formerly of J.P. Morgan and Schlumberger), and Remus Pop (CRO, formerly of Bank of America Merrill Lynch), Neurolabs’ founding team brings deep expertise in AI, computer science, mathematics, and machine learning. The trio met at the University of Edinburgh and has spent over a decade working together, combining academic research with industry experience to tackle the limitations of traditional image recognition in retail.
The founders discovered that existing computer vision systems were slow, expensive, and struggled to scale in the dynamic retail environment, where new products and packaging constantly emerge. To address these challenges, they leveraged their academic research to pioneer the use of synthetic data for image recognition, enabling faster, more cost-effective, and more accurate model training and deployment.
Neurolabs emerged in response to the shortcomings of traditional image recognition technology in the CPG and retail industries. The company now partners with leading CPG and retail technology companies globally, including a US soft drinks manufacturer, a European drinks and brewing company, and a UK soft drinks manufacturer. These organisations are using synthetic data and visual AI to improve on-shelf availability and redefine operational benchmarks across their field execution programs. Neurolabs’ Visual AI functions as an infrastructure layer within the enterprise tech stack, enabling swift deployment, seamless integration, and cross-market scalability.
The technology has delivered impressive results, with CPG brands reporting a 32% reduction in field operational costs and a 93% faster product onboarding time. By eliminating manual audits and providing instant product-level analytics, Neurolabs has reduced the time from store visit to action from days to minutes.
Merging synthetic data and digital twins to automate and scale image recognition
Traditional retail image recognition systems are slow, expensive, and struggle to keep pace with evolving products and packaging. Manual data collection and annotation can create bottlenecks, particularly for large and dynamic SKU catalogues.
Neurolabs’ breakthrough lies in its use of synthetic data, virtual recreations of real-world products and environments, enabling rapid SKU onboarding in minutes rather than weeks, highly accurate and current product catalogues, and proactive image recognition that anticipates market changes. The company’s proprietary datasets, including NLB200k, Nuke1.0, and Nuke2.0, combine procedurally generated retail scenes with real-world images, ensuring robust, diverse models capable of fine-grained product classification.
Neurolabs’ ZIA platform automates and scales image recognition for inventory, pricing, and promotional compliance. Acting as an infrastructure layer within the enterprise tech stack, it integrates seamlessly with Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools, such as Aforza Studio, enabling rapid deployment, real-time insights, and scalability across markets to help brands and retailers maintain agility and competitiveness.
Carles Ferrer, General Partner at Nauta, commented: “The rise of AI-powered products in recent years has been astronomical, but the adoption of truly innovative AI remains a significant challenge, especially at the enterprise level. Neurolabs’ use of synthetic data pipelines is enabling some of the world’s largest CPG brands to rapidly embed Visual AI at the core of their retail operations. This commercial traction, combined with the strength of the technology and the team, has really impressed everyone at Nauta. We’re excited to back Neurolabs at this pivotal stage.”
