Forge Retail Pulse: A sneak peek into quick commerce, customer experience analytics, personalization platforms, and a spotlight on the urgent need for cybersecurity tech
A warm Forge welcome to our more than 1,500 Pulse subscribers! Thank you for being a member of our community - please do continue sharing these editions with your peers.
Our next Forge Retail Showcase is July 15th from 10:00 to 11:00 am ET and will focus on the Sustainable Retail Revolution. Join us as we hear from three disrupters who have developed environmentally conscious solutions to meet global needs and consumer demands.
This week, we’re looking at quick commerce, customer experience analytics, and a personalization platform. Recent news about payment giants like Venmo leaving customer data unprotected has us digging deeper into cybersecurity tech with companies that guard consumer data, protect business reputations, and stop fraudsters in their tracks. We round it out with two essential reads that provoke new ways of thinking about e-commerce and the future of automation. Ready? Here we go!
Startup Deals
Quick Commerce | Grocery delivery boomed during the pandemic leaving many retailers scrambling to meet demand and numerous startups hustling to fill the gap to get customers their orders in under two hours. However, as customer expectations evolve, demand for shorter delivery times has increased. Meet Flink, a Germany-based startup offering a selection of more than 2,000 products, delivered to clients in 10 minutes or less. By leveraging more than 50 Flink-owned delivery hubs located in densely populated locations in 28 cities, they are accelerating last-mile delivery to warp speed. Founded only six months ago by former Bain partner Oliver Merkel (with Julian Dames and Christoph Cordes), Flink raised an extraordinary $240 million Series A. For other companies pushing the boundaries of last-mile delivery, check out the “Theme Exploration” section from our May 13 Pulse edition.
Customer Experience Analytics | Retailers are always looking to improve the customer experience. After all, when customers have a great experience, they buy more, become loyal, and share their experience with friends. But how can retailers tell which improvements are having the biggest impact on customers? Contentsquare, a SaaS platform, has the tools to do just that. By recording every in-webpage user interaction and “micro gesture,” Contentsquare attempts to capture and analyze the impact of digital experiences. It then turns this analysis into scores and recommendations aimed at helping inform a company’s decisions regarding content, flow, and overall brand strategy. In trying to fill the gap between the experiences retailers think they are offering and what consumers are actually getting, Contentsquare helps drive customer experience improvements. They recently closed on $500 million in Series E financing, bringing total capital raised to date to $800 million with a valuation of $2.8 billion.
Personalization Platform | Marketers have more tools than ever to reach out to customers - think web, email, SMS, and more. However, without smart personalization, customers may end up getting spammed with the same message across every channel. That’s where Breinify comes in. In applying AI and data science to personalization, Breinify helps marketers improve a customer’s experience by personalizing messages tailored to individual tastes. The platform is designed to be accessible to non-technical marketing employees, which means everyone can access the power of machine learning and algorithms to create personalized digital experiences for their consumers. This simplicity allowed them to “land-and-expand” with customers and upsell approximately 80% of their clients from a point of contact to contract in 2020. Breinify raised a total of $11 million in seed money to bring the power of data science to the marketing team.
Theme Exploration: Cybersecurity Tech
With e-commerce growing at an unprecedented rate, cybersecurity in all its forms is more important than ever. The companies below are creating new ways to prevent fraud, protect customer data, and help retailers fight disinformation online. As businesses and consumers spend more of their lives online, cybersecurity tech is helping ensure they’re safe from any threat that may come their way.
E-Commerce Fraud Prevention | Signifyd is a risk and fraud-prevention platform designed to make commerce safer for online retailers. Signifyd helps companies verify customers’ online identities to prevent account hijacking and fraudulent transactions. In addition, by leveraging big data, machine learning, and expert manual reviews, Signifyd provides retailers with exceptional revenue protection while maintaining a seamless user experience. They’re so confident, they offer a financial guarantee against fraud on any approved orders that turn out to be fraudulent. By shifting fraud liability away from retailers, solutions like Signifyd enable retailers to provide friction-free buying experiences for their customers, increase sales, and open new markets, all while reducing risk.
Consumer Data Privacy | As consumers interact with retailers through multiple channels, safeguarding and locating their data becomes an ever-growing challenge. Solutions like the BigID platform give retailers the ability to do both. Reducing breach risk by using advanced machine learning and identity intelligence, BigID helps retailers safeguard and ensure the privacy of sensitive data. In addition, by meeting compliance requirements for emerging data protection regulations, the platform lowers retailers’ regulatory risk and helps meet customer privacy expectations. With tools like policy enforcement and automated DSARs, BigID offers retailers the ability to keep customer data safe and unified.
Digital Brand Protection | As Mark Twain supposedly said, “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” Yonder is a social media threat mitigation platform designed to protect retailers from disinformation. The platform leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect false social media propaganda, campaigns, and news in real-time. This enables retailers protection from the damage caused by fake messaging and helps maintain their integrity in the shifting world of social media. By stopping social media misinformation, identifying fake reviews, and flagging product counterfeits on marketplaces, companies like Yonder help protect retailers from online threats and keep their reputations intact.
Essential Industry Reads
These days, we often measure the adoption of e-commerce as the percentage of online sales compared to total sales. While this makes sense, it may be hiding a more interesting story, because, after all, nearly everything can be purchased online. Benedict Evans takes a different approach: instead of looking at how goods are purchased, he investigates how they are delivered. After all, if you drive to Walmart instead of walking to a local store, you don’t call it “car-based commerce.” So why do we call it “e-commerce” if you buy online and pick up in-store? Click below to learn more about “e-commerce as logistics.”
As the pandemic upset every sector of the economy, leaving businesses struggling to make ends meet, automation has come to be seen as a way back to profitability. Over on Crunchbase, Christine Hall takes a look at the companies shaping the future of automation and sees everything from robotic cooks to headless checkouts to smart queues. Follow the link below to see why retail and restaurant automation is getting major startup attention.
Forge Showcase
Our June Showcase, focused on Last-Mile Delivery, was a huge success featuring an all-star lineup of presenters including Nuro, Gorillas, and Takeoff Technologies. If you missed this event or want to share the insights with your colleagues, click below to watch the recording.
Mark your calendars for our next Showcase event!
July 15 | The Sustainable Retail Revolution: Environmentally conscious solutions to meet global needs and consumer demands.
Register here to attend → http://atbain.co/SustainableRetailRevolution
If you enjoyed reading this edition of Retail Pulse, please subscribe below to receive our future editions and early invitations to our Forge Retail Showcase events.
See you in two weeks!