Greetings, Pulse Subscribers!
We’ve got a great edition this week covering all the news you need to know. Here’s the agenda:
Cutting Retail Emissions
Creating a Store’s “Digital Twin”
“Machine Learning-as-a-Service”
How to Future-Proof Your Company
Let’s go!
Startup Deals
Retail Carbon Tracking | Here’s a sobering fact: the retail sector’s carbon footprint is reportedly responsible for 20% of all global emissions - more than international flights and the maritime industry combined. With rapid reduction needed for the health of the planet and customers demanding businesses practice sustainability, retailers have to act fast to face this challenge. Enter Vaayu, a carbon-tracking platform specifically designed for e-commerce and retail companies. By connecting with retailers through their point-of-sale systems, Vaayu claims to calculate the carbon footprint of all daily transactions in real-time using the company’s database of more than 600,000+ data points. The platform tells customers what to change and prioritize to reduce emissions and can calculate the carbon emissions of specific products. Rather than needing full transparency into a retailer's supply chain, Vaayu matches data the retailer has with its proprietary database to fill in the gaps. Vaayu also allows customers to see how they stack up against an industry average and offers both carbon removal projects and offsetting to help businesses move toward carbon neutrality. This is good for the planet and makes customers happy. Vaayu recently raised $11.5 million in seed funding.
In-Store Digital Advertising Network | Over the past few years, there’s been a tremendous focus on the growing sector of online grocery shopping, but this focus overlooks the fact that 90% of grocery shopping still happens in-store. Hoping to improve the grocery shopping experience, Clerk, an Austin, Texas-based startup, gives customers something better than tabloids to look at in the checkout aisle. Through the screens they provide, Clerk offers a digital advertising network called Grocery TV for brands and retailers to leverage. With the aim of improving the shopping experience, Clerk allows brick-and-mortar grocery stores to engage customers with store information and deals while improving revenue by receiving a share of all advertising sold on the platform from major companies like PepsiCo, Chase, Mars, and Mondelez. With over 14,000 displays already in all 50 states at over 2,700 stores, including ShopRite, Bashas’, and Cub Foods, Clerk recently raised $30 million in Series B funding.
Digitizing Inventory | There are numerous startups offering inventory robots to retailers that automatically monitor what’s on the shelf, keeping track of inventory, planograms, and ordering, to name just a few benefits. What sets Zippedi and its technology apart in this sector is that its bots create an online “digital twin” of the store, so customers and employees know not only what is on the shelf but where to find it in the store. With this digital map, Zippedi’s system can both offer direction to items and provide a prioritized shopping list, so shoppers can be in and out as quickly as possible, while workers have more visibility into inventory with real-time data, letting them focus on higher-value tasks in-store. This not only benefits shoppers and employees but helps facilitate and accelerate last-mile delivery for companies like DoorDash. While currently pilot testing their system, Zippedi is already working with Unilever, S. C. Johnson, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, and Colgate. Zippedi recently raised $12.5 million in Series A funding.
Personalized Experiences | As e-commerce continues to evolve, experience personalization has become the norm. However, the tech aspects of personalization can be restrictive for new or mid-market companies. This is why Jarvis ML offers what it calls “machine learning-as-a-service”. Its platform uses algorithms to learn sales and inventory patterns from a company’s data, then builds prediction, pricing, and promotion models that allow any company to personalize its websites, apps, advertising, and customer service. With Jarvis ML, companies own their own data, while the platform helps them optimize for revenue across different shoppers’ lifetime values, preferences, and tastes. With the goal of helping companies of all sizes use machine learning to hyper-personalize every customer journey, Jarvis ML recently raised $16 million in seed funding led by Dell Technologies Capital.
Essential Industry Reads
With newspaper and pay-TV subscriptions dropping substantially over the last few years, where are retailers and brands spending the ad money they used to spend there? And as companies expand their D2C services to accommodate the e-commerce boom, what gets a better ROI: opening a new store or accelerating delivery time? Benedict Evans dives into these and other questions with a look at how advertising techniques and priorities have changed, and what companies are doing to engage their customers as many old channels (newspaper, pay-TV) dry up and new ones (Amazon ads, social media) take their place.
In a sense, the pandemic showed us what different retailers were really made of. Some weren’t prepared to adjust to the new reality and ended up going out of business. Others were nimble and not only survived but grew quickly. Over at Inc., they’ve spoken with a slate of retail founders and investors who thrived during the last few difficult years to determine what they did, and are continuing to do, to “future-proof” their companies. From supply chain to forecasting, to authentic branding, this short look at what successful companies are focused on is essential for any business interested in being prepared for the future.
Forge Retail Showcase - Future of Delivery
Registration is back open for our Forge Retail Showcase on Wednesday, June 15th from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm ET. During the event, we’ll focus on the Future of Delivery and hear from DoorDash, Arive, Food Rocket, and Zipline about the latest innovations in delivery technologies. We look forward to seeing you there!
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See you in two weeks!