Unleashing Retail's Future: AI, No-Code, and Supply Chain Breakthroughs
Greetings, Pulse Subscribers!
This week, we’re drilling into AI, no-code, and supply chain. These days you can’t go anywhere online without running into ’em. Here’s the agenda:
The perfect customer exists … you just have to create them
We found it—a supply chain crystal ball
The robots are now … learning from robots
No code? No problem
New math from Bain: AI + retail = the future?
Show me the money!
Let’s go.
Startup Deals
AI Consumer Insights | Customer feedback is only as valuable (and reliable) as the customer offering it, so what if you could “create” the perfect customer to ask questions that can improve your business? That’s the idea behind Native, an always-on market intelligence platform that uses generative AI to power consumer research, helping retailers optimize products, and better understand customers. With its proprietary generative AI, Native uses real-time industry, consumer, and product data to create custom digital twins of target customers or consumer bases. Users can interact with the digital twins and ask specific questions about products, habits, and preferences, receiving actionable and unbiased answers within minutes. Additionally, what sets Native apart from other generative AI models on the market is that Native’s internal AI is not open to nonspecific public data sets. Instead, it’s trained on carefully curated first- and third-party data chosen for the task at hand. Native recently raised $3.5 million in Seed funding.
Predictive Insights for Supply Chain | With the global nature of retail today, there are simply too many links in the supply chain, stretching too far around the world, for everything to go right all the time. To help businesses combat supply chain surprises and slowdowns, Everstream combines data based on supply chain interactions with AI and analytics to generate strategic risk scores assessed at the material, supplier, and facility location level. Then, the Everstream platform maps the flow of parts and components across the entire network, coupling AI predictions and intelligence-based modeling with expert human analysis to anticipate disruption and improve the responsiveness and competitiveness of the supply chain. By predicting problems before they happen, Everstream helps businesses stay ahead of their supply chain issues. Everstream doubled its business in 2021 and 2022 and recently raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Morgan Stanley’s 1GT Fund.
AI Robotics Platform | AI logistics robots seem to be improving every week, and one of the big reasons is that they’re learning more. Covariant’s platform offers numerous autonomous robots for warehouse operations, including ones for order sorting, item induction, good-to-person order picking, kitting, and depalletization. What makes the Covariant robots special is that they’re all powered by a unified AI platform—the Covariant Brain. Since the AI in the Covariant Brain learns and improves from all the robots, every robot gets better and faster. Already pre-trained on millions of picks from Covariant robots in warehouses worldwide, the Covariant Brain enables robots to autonomously pick virtually any SKU or item on day one. With incredible 6x growth in 2022 and top fulfillment companies like GXO, Radial, and McKesson as customers, Covariant recently raised $75 million in Series C funding, bringing its total to $222 million.
No-Code Mobile App Development | Looking to create a dynamic mobile app but don’t know how to code? Don’t worry; Apptile has you covered. Its simple drag-and-drop interface offers a growing library of immersive content tiles to create customized apps without a line of code. With tiles for content like subscription boxes, sale countdowns, quizzes, personalized shopping recommendations, and more, Apptile lets users create precisely the app they want. Users can also send hyper-personalized push notifications, which, according to Apptile, leverage customer segments, deep linking, and scheduling to convert 4x sales. Beyond the tiles, Apptile enables full customization with its design system, which allows users to integrate their brand identity in a few clicks, including fonts, logos, colors, and more. And, of course, Apptile’s easy-to-use customer-facing app facilitates advanced analytics by giving users the power to pipe all customer events to the BI tool of their choice or their own data warehouse. Apptile raised $2.5 million in a Seed round.
Essential Reads
If it feels like Pulse has been fixated on AI recently, we’re not—it’s just everywhere right now. The opportunities that generative AI presents are fascinating and possibly industry-changing, especially in retail. In this in-depth webinar, partners from Bain’s Retail and Advanced Analytics practices discuss OpenAI and its many uses, from Chat GPT-4 to Dall-E and more. However, what’s most informative is their take on how AI can help retailers stay ahead of the competition in everything from customer service to product creation.
Learn about generative AI in retail here.
Where are the venture dollars going? Right now? Not many places. In this report looking at Q1 2023, CB Insights shows that startups around the globe raised a collective $58.6 billion in venture funding, which may sound big but is a 13% drop from the last quarter and the lowest level of investment since before the pandemic. International startups, in particular, have struggled to fundraise at the same level they had previously. That said, 13 unicorns were minted, with 4 of them being AI developers.
Read the full Q1 VC report here.