Consumer budgets are expected to be better this holiday shopping season, which could lead to better sales results for retailers. It remains a challenge to capture those consumer dollars amid a myriad of messages coming at consumers from all directions.
But one startup believes it has cracked the code on how brands and retailers can target and connect with customers more effectively.
Come across Birdseye, a Toronto-based company focused on AI retail and e-commerce. Matt Bogoroch started the company in 2021 with his brother, Adam Bogoroch, and Shardul Frey to provide e-commerce analytics for Shopify brands to improve their marketing and advertising efforts and bring them on a level playing field with larger companies.
They recognized that smaller, online retailers don’t have the dedicated analytics teams to provide the data needed to boost marketing, thereby leaving sales on the table.
Two years later, the company has evolved into a platform for major brands and retailers that offers the skills of a Chief Marketing Officer with AI, including running hyper-personalized email and SMS campaigns and insights from retail transaction data, from a dashboard control.
Its technology calculates millions of marketing actions for the retailer so it can match its customers with the products they would most likely be interested in buying at any given time and price.
Birdseye’s Marketing Proposal Dashboard. Image Credits: Birdseye
This includes excess inventory so retailers don’t have to run sales or mass email campaigns. Additionally, Birdseye is able to alert retailers of potential customer churn so they can proactively respond with personalized offers to help retain them.
“Each message and discount is unique, built from an advanced big-language model, ensuring relevance and appeal for every recipient,” CEO Matt Bogoroch told TechCrunch via email. “Imagine Nike has 800 yellow size 16 shoes that they struggle to sell because of their unique size/color combination. Birdseye’s AI can identify customers who prefer the color yellow and wear a size 16, and then approach personalized shoe prices — all without human intervention.”
The company works with around 120 logos, including Midori, bag & bougie and Eva Franco. That’s a 100 percent increase since the beginning of the year, Bogoroch said. He declined to elaborate on the revenue increase.
Birdseye secured $500,000 in a pre-seed round from Drive Capital in March. Today, the venture capital firm injected additional capital into the company, this time $3 million in seed funding. As part of the investment, Drive Capital partner Masha Khusid will join Birdseye’s board of directors.
With the funding, Birdseye has two years of runway and will focus on growing its customer base to include more mid-market and enterprise companies. It will also grow from eight to 14 engineers, mostly on the machine learning side, Bogoroch said.
