Halla, a Los Angeles-based artificial intelligence (AI) company, announced a $1.4 million seed round, led by early stage food industry investor E&A Venture Capital, San Francisco, with participation from multi-stage technology investor SOSV, Princeton, N.J.

The funding round follows Halla’s 2018 release of Halla I/O, an intelligent ordering platform that uses machine learning technology built on the psychography of food selection to increase order volume and frequency for online grocers.

Halla will use the funding to scale its I/O platform, onboard new customers and further develop AI technology.

“We know 35% of Amazon’s product sales are generated by recommendations, while personalized shopping recommendations in the e-grocery space are still very under-developed,” says Adam Haber, commodity trader for E&A Venture Capital. “We think there’s tremendous opportunity for growth in this space.”

“We remain committed to our personalized recommendation platform, which is built around a proprietary ‘food logic’ algorithm to result in bigger orders and better predictive analytics for grocers and higher customer satisfaction for e-grocery shoppers,” says Spencer Price, co-founder of Halla. “This new round of funding will allow us to scale our Halla I/O offering, and we look forward to continuing to partner with our customers and investors to transform the e-grocery shopping experience.”