Cornea · Conversational commerce for direct-to-consumer brands · Mitochondria
Cornea · Conversational commerce for direct brands

Cornea makes your store hold a conversation that guides every customer to the right purchase.

Cornea is the most comprehensive conversational system built for direct-to-consumer commerce, and the first of its kind. It engages each customer in your brand's voice and their own language, learns what they want from what they say and do, and ethically guides the whole purchase from the first question through to checkout and back for the next order.

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The gap is rarely about traffic or price. It opens where a customer needs the right answer at the right moment, and to feel heard while they decide. That is what Cornea does.

eCommerce stores in 2026 are paying more to bring customers in and losing more of them on the way through. The figures below are category averages rather than Cornea's own claims. They describe the gap Cornea is built to close.

70%
of online carts are abandoned before checkout.
Baymard Institute, meta-analysis of 50 studies, 2025
21x
more likely to qualify a lead when a query is answered within five minutes, against thirty.
Lead Response Management Study, Oldroyd et al.
20-35%
conversion uplift on conversational commerce implementations over baseline eCommerce.
Industry benchmarks across Bloomreach, Salesforce, and conversational AI studies, 2025–26
76%
of online shoppers prefer to buy with information in their native language. 40% never buy from sites in another.
CSA Research, "Can't Read, Won't Buy", survey of 8,709 consumers across 29 countries

Most of that gap is a communication problem in disguise: a question left unanswered, a register that does not fit the buyer, a second language they read less fluently, or a moment of hesitation with no one in the room. No one likes being sold to, and Cornea does not try to. It gives each customer the right answer on their own terms and stays with them until they are ready, which is what closes the gap.

Get more from the demand you already have.

Cornea runs the whole purchase as one system: it reads the catalogue live, writes to the cart, applies the discount the customer is owed, runs returns and refunds, remembers each customer across channels, and builds products that were never on the shelf. Most tools do one or two of these. Doing the full set in one system is what makes it the most comprehensive of its kind. What it changes for you depends on where you sit.

Take the gaps one at a time.

A question left unanswered at the deciding moment
Cornea answers it in the thread, before the visit ends.
A reply that arrives too late, or not at all
Cornea responds at once, at any hour.
A second language the buyer reads less fluently
Cornea speaks the language the customer thinks in.
The wrong size or variant, returned after it ships
Cornea settles fit from a garment that already fits.
20-35%
The conversion uplift conversational commerce delivers over a standard storefront, on the traffic you have already paid for. Cornea is built to reach the top of that range, because it runs the whole purchase rather than a piece of it.
You're scaling it
Deepen customer engagement.
Conversational commerce lifts the share of visitors who engage rather than slip away, because it meets them and serves the whole visit. It surfaces why they came and what they want, a read on your buyers that page-views never gave. You get more from the spend already made, and a sharper view of the demand behind it.
You're running it
Everything in one conversation.
Your team answers the same questions across a scatter of channels, and personalisation stops at the segment. Cornea takes that repeat work off them and handles the returns and order changes that fill a support queue. It runs every channel as one conversation, speaking to each customer rather than each segment. The same team carries a much larger store.
You've backed it
A winning lever for your portfolio.
You have put money into real demand that is spending into a leaking funnel, with little sight of why. Cornea lifts conversion on the spend already being made, which moves CAC payback and contribution margin, and it gives you structured data on what the market actually wants. The same lever works across the brands you hold.

As many personas as the journey needs.

Most tools field everything through a single assistant, so the voice that greets a first-time visitor is the same one that handles a return. Cornea runs as a multi-agent system. Each part of the purchase has its own configured persona, with its own scope, register, and limits, and a brand runs as many as the journey calls for. Behind them, other agents carry out the actions each conversation sets in motion. The four below are a common starting set.

THE VOICES IT SPEAKS IN Discovery Expert Advisor Support CORNEA · ONE CONVERSATION AGENTS AT WORK Cart Offers Returns Records ONE MEMORY · A PROFILE PER CUSTOMER
Discovery
The host.
Greets the visitor, reads where they are in the store, and moves the conversation from broad intent towards a specific need, in the brand's own voice. It surfaces the products that fit and asks the questions that take the customer a step forward.
What this persona doesn't do Push for the sale. Discovery's job is to qualify rather than close.
Expert
The specialist.
Carries deep product knowledge in the brand's domain, whether that is nutrition for a food brand, materials for fashion, skin science for beauty, or specification depth for electronics. It answers technical questions with real authority, because the persona was configured with that knowledge rather than left to improvise.
What this persona doesn't do Speculate past what it has been given. Claims have hard boundaries.
Purchase guidance
The advisor.
Handles the moment of decision. It compares options, reads the cart, builds configurable products through the conversation where the brand offers them, applies any discount the customer is eligible for, and writes the chosen item to the cart. The customer never leaves the thread to buy.
What this persona doesn't do Run the transaction. Cart and checkout stay in your platform, where they belong.
Support
The keeper.
Carries the conversation after the sale. It knows what was bought, when, and by whom, answers delivery questions, runs returns and refunds from request through to the money moving, makes simple order changes, and hands the judgement calls to your team with the full context attached.
What this persona doesn't do Pretend to be a person. When judgement is needed, it hands over and says so.

Underneath all personas, a single Mitochondria system authenticates the customer, keeps the basket in step with live stock and price, records what it learns, and makes sure a conversation ends in something done.

Infuse your store with intelligence.

A product page simply describes it as is, and the catalogue indicates whether it is in stock. Neither holds the brand's judgement about which product suits which customer, why it exists, who it is for, and how it should be shown. Cornea adds that layer. You decide how it behaves.

Provenance
Brand voice at the core.
A founder's voice tucked away on an About page does little for the buyer standing over a product, wondering whether it is right for them. Cornea attaches the things that carry the brand's authority, the origin, the craft, the sourcing, the material science, to each item as structured data, and brings them into the conversation at the point the buyer is deciding.
Curation
Buyer signals that matter.
"People who bought this also bought" flattens a considered brand into a generic marketplace. Cornea separates what the buyer is there for, the wedding, the gift, the wardrobe being built, from the signals they leave through history and browsing, and lets your curation rules decide what surfaces. Your judgement leads and the algorithm assists.
Trust controls
Trust engineered into the system.
A brand earns trust differently from a marketplace. Cornea builds a set of trust controls into the system, each addressing a specific risk in the buyer's encounter, drawn from our work in handicrafts trade-tech. You decide which controls apply, what each one does when it triggers, and when the safer call is to hand to a person.
Brand tempo
The journey unfolds at your pace.
Most storefront design treats speed as the only virtue. Some brands have earned the right to move slowly, to let a buyer sit with a question and to make a measured recommendation instead of a fast one. Cornea is configured to your tempo rather than the category default, and you decide when to nudge and when to wait.

It replaces what isn't working.

You probably already run a chat tool. It answers FAQs and deflects tickets, but it cannot surface the right product, add it to the cart, or move a sale forward. Cornea keeps what works in your stack, the catalogue, cart, and fulfilment, reads and writes to them, and runs the selling conversation a help widget never could. It also takes on the work that usually piles up in the same inbox, handled in the thread rather than queued for a person:

Support
Product, order, and delivery questions answered in the thread, with the order already in context.
Policy questions
Shipping, sizing, care, and returns policy answered precisely, in the brand's own words.
Returns
Qualifies the return and runs the whole return conversation, way, way beyond a basic form.
Wholesale enquiries
Gives the trade enquiry a considered, brand-right reply, and routes the serious ones on.
THE CONVERSATION CORNEA · RUNS THE CONVERSATION writes reads Catalogue Cart Fulfilment YOUR EXISTING STACK
Catalogue
Reads your platform, live.
Products, variants, prices, stock, images, and descriptions, all read live from your platform. When you update a product, Cornea sees the update.
Cart and checkout
Adds to your existing cart.
Cornea writes into your platform's cart, and the customer checks out through your existing flow. Your payment gateway, shipping rules, taxes, discounts, and abandoned-cart recovery keep working exactly as they do today.
Channels
Wherever your customer is.
The persona, the context, and the cart move with the customer, so a conversation that starts in one place carries on in another without losing the thread or the preferences gathered along the way.

Configure custom products in conversation.

Most chat tools point the customer back at the catalogue. For brands whose offering is configurable, Cornea composes a new product inside the conversation, within the rules the brand defines: which components are allowed, and how they may combine. It reads the customer's preferences, from what they say and what it can infer, and assembles a valid SKU with its own attributes, pricing, and substitution logic, ready for the cart.

The four below are configurators we have built or modelled. The same architecture extends to any product where the customer is choosing across several variables, whether quantity rules, allergens, exclusions, preference waterfalls, or fit and measurements.

WHAT YOU ALLOW WHAT THEY WANT CORNEA COMPOSES WITHIN THE RULES ADDED TO THE CART, AS A NEW SKU
Food brands
Made-to-order mixes, with the nutrition label built in
Custom muesli, trail mix, granola, gift hampers. Cornea composes within the brand's ingredient rules and ratios, drawing out what the customer is after and what they cannot have, and resolving substitutions when a component runs short. On confirmation it returns a priced SKU and the FSSAI-compliant nutrition table for that exact combination, the part most brands find slow to produce by hand for every variant. Allergen exclusions are settled in the conversation, before the order, where a mistake still costs nothing.
Beauty & skincare
Routines that fit the skin, and get followed
Routines configured against skin type, concerns, ingredient preferences, and climate. Cornea asks what the customer uses now and what has reacted badly before. It flags actives that should not sit in the same routine and orders the morning and evening steps into something workable, priced and added as a single line item. Most skincare that comes back was bought on a guess about what would suit, and this settles the guess before the purchase.
Electronics & audio
Bundles built around the use, not the spec sheet
Bundles built around what the customer will actually do with the kit, the room it plays in or the commute it travels on. Cornea checks the pieces work together and adds the cable, mount, or adapter the choice implies, so nothing essential is missing when the box arrives. Consumer electronics carry some of the highest return rates in retail, much of it down to mismatch and the wrong fit for the use, by industry estimates. Settling the use case first is what keeps the bundle from coming back.
Apparel
Smart sizing, from a garment that already fits
Good clothes fit by drape, occasion, and the body they are worn on, not size alone. Cornea asks about a garment the customer has worn well, reading a photo of it if they send one, drawing out what worked and what did not, then turns it into a measurement set the brand's tailor can act on, with a fitting where the piece deserves one. Fit and sizing is the single largest cause of returns in apparel, behind as much as 70% of them by industry estimates, settled here before the order is placed.

Structured data from every conversation.

A storefront forgets each visit. Cornea keeps every one as structured, first-party data you own, held in your environment and gathered with consent. Three things come out of it.

Customer profile
In-depth customer profile.
Cornea builds a profile for each customer from the conversation itself: their goals, constraints, preferences, and past choices. It is first-party, gathered with consent, held in your environment under the same GDPR, UK GDPR, and DPDP terms as the rest of your data, and never used to train shared models. The outcome is personalisation that sharpens with every exchange, and a customer asset that is yours.
Demand signal
What the market wants, early.
Across customers, the same conversations aggregate into a live read on demand: the intents people arrive with, the configurations they build, the needs they raise that you do not yet sell, and which of the benefits you market actually land. The outcome is sharper merchandising, a real input to the roadmap, and demand you can see forming before it shows in revenue.
Instrumented funnel
See exactly where it leaks.
Every conversation is measured: recommendation relevance, turns to a basket the customer keeps, the stage at which people drop, unique configurations generated, and satisfaction at the point of decision. Because each drop sits inside a conversation, the record shows the reason people gave, alongside the point where they left. The outcome is a precise account of where conversion is won and lost, in place of an estimate.

One system, three tiers.

The difference between them is architectural: how much of the catalogue, the cart, and the memory runs live and in context, which sets both the consumption profile and the price. We work the right tier out with you on the walkthrough, where we are also honest about fit, since the heaviest build is rarely the right place for a smaller brand to start. For ambitious brands the conversation goes further, into co-building and co-innovating on proprietary use cases, and at times into a standing AI partnership behind the brand.

Entry
Conversational discovery and recommendations, then a clean handoff to your checkout. The lightest way to begin.
Focus
The full conversation across your catalogue, with recommendations and the cart built in the thread. For a multi-SKU brand.
Vision
Everything live and bespoke: custom products built in conversation, a real-time cart, and the deepest memory. For configurable ranges.

Memory comes with every tier. How deep it runs, and how much sits live in context, is what we size with you. Get in touch for the detail.

Worth asking.

How is this different from the AI chat tools already in our app store?

Cornea does the whole job in one system.

The tools in this space tend to specialise. Helpdesk tools are strong on tickets and order status, and their shopping personas tend to be recent and narrow. Marketing-automation tools handle social messages, and tend to configure each channel on its own. Category specialists go deep in a single vertical. Retrieval chatbots answer catalogue questions, and are often not built to write to the cart, read live stock, or hold context when the customer changes channel. Each does well what it was built for. Cornea carries configured personas across the whole purchase, reads the live catalogue, writes to the cart, keeps memory across channels and personas, and runs domain expertise configured per brand.

Why add Cornea to my eCommerce stack?

Cornea does the selling, and remembers everything.

It meets each visitor, works out what they are looking for, answers the questions that decide the purchase, recommends well, and stays with them through to the cart and checkout. Alongside that, it maintains a continuous, consented record of demand: the intent behind each visit, the reasons a basket stalls, the configurations customers ask for, and a profile that deepens for each customer. It reads today's stock and writes to your existing cart, so nothing is duplicated. You keep the existing transaction engine and gain both guided sales and rich data. Imagine the cost-efficiency and the behavioural insights you can mine.

How does it handle context when the customer switches channels?

The conversation, the cart, and the persona move with the customer.

A discovery exchange on your website can carry on over a phone messaging platform, the expert persona picking up where it left off and the advisor arriving already aware of what was explained. The customer is never asked to repeat themselves, and no thread is lost between channels.

What happens when the AI doesn't know the answer?

It escalates honestly, and hands your team the full conversation in context.

Escalation rules are explicit and configurable. Some brands start conservative and widen Cornea's autonomy as they watch it handle edge cases; others start broader and narrow where needed. The customer always knows when they have been passed to a person.

How does data work?

Your data stays in your environment, and we never train shared models on your conversations.

Conversations and catalogue access are processed transiently, encrypted in transit and at rest, through our cloud infrastructure. Your customer data, your transactions, and the brand-specific persona configurations stay with you. The connection terms are set out in our DPA, aligned with GDPR, UK GDPR, and DPDP.

How does it handle our brand voice?

We are brand strategists and storytellers as much as engineers.

The voice is built from how your brand already speaks: your brand documents, your best product descriptions, your past customer emails, whatever shows the register and rhythm, and the things the brand would never say. We bring communication science to it, the persuasion and behavioural research our team works in, so the voice is shaped to persuade while staying unmistakably yours. It shifts by context, warmer in discovery and precise at the point of fit, without the thread resetting or the brand becoming unrecognisable. The story travels with the product too: origin, craft, and founder voice held as structured data and retrieved at the moment the buyer is deciding, rather than stranded on an About page. Where a brand earns trust in its own way, we engineer that in as explicit controls, drawing on years of trade-tech work with heritage crafts, and every later adjustment runs through the same brief.

Which languages does Cornea handle?

All major languages, with easy switch-overs, tailored to each brand.

Each customer reads and is answered in the language they think in. Anything beyond the standard set we cover on the walkthrough.

Which eCommerce platforms does Cornea connect to?

The major platforms and headless setups, connected through APIs.

The underlying platform is largely a configuration choice. If your store runs on a stack we have not connected to yet, we will say so on the walkthrough rather than promise blindly.

Bring Cornea to your store.

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