INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
A lot of the innovation we&ve seen in the world of commerce has been focused on the front end of the business: how to use digital tools to
improve shoppers& experiences both online and offline — ultimately get them to buy more
Today, however, comes news of some funding for a startup that has built an app to help the retailers themselves
Yoobic, whose SaaS platform lets retail staff communicate with head offices to plan and execute merchandising and marketing campaigns using
technology like computer vision to get the job done — to make the in-store experience as agile as the online one, in the words of CEO and
co-founder
has raised $25 million in funding, money that it will use to expand beyond its home markets of London and Europe to the US.
The
funding is being led by Insight Venture Partners, the prolific investor that has been especially active of late
Felix Capital, which led the startup Series A, is also in this round.
The money comes on the heels of strong growth for Yoobic: revenues are
up by 143 percent between 2016 and 2017, and the product is now being used by 100 retailers and their wider range of 200,000 stores in 44
Some 100,000 tasks get completed each month using the app each month, a 250 percent rise versus 2017
Customers include a number of luxury brands, Lacoste, the Casino Group, Aldi UK (part of Aldi Sud, which also has operations in the US; Aldi
Nord, a separate business, owns Trader Joe&s), and car companies like Peugeot and Citroen.
Yoobic is using the power of technology to
address a particular pain point in the world of retail
When a company — either a brand or the retailer selling goods — has merchandise dispersed across multiple locations, it becomes a
challenge to sell items in a consistent way.
A sale, or a particular campaign, or simply just a house style for how to lay out products are
all scenarios that are hard to do consistently and efficiently when you have a disparate staff of salespeople — the average level of churn
of retail salespeople is 50 percent annually and it rising —needing to take communications from a central office and people who may be
nowhere in your physical vicinity.
Yoobic solution is a platform that works on a mobile app — or a computer, although the vast majority of
salespeople use mobile devices as they do not sit at desks — that provides running conversations around different campaigns, with
instructions of how to present items.
Crucially, it very simple to use: you need something simple not just because of employee churn, but
because campaigns, sales and other changes in retail layout potentially might be taking place throughout the day, saidFabrice Haïat, CEO
&We don&t have time to train.&
The remote salespeople can use their device camera to shoot their own layouts to check them against the
provided instructions, and the app algorithms checks these automatically and suggests changes where they might be needed
When everything meets specifications, notifications get sent to managers at the head office to let them know that the layout has been
completed.
Down the line, the same systems can potentially be used for inventory checks, updates on in-store footfall, and other physical
details that are harder to monitor when you&re not at the store
&We&re just scratching the surface,& Haïat said.
Haïat added that in the past, a company would have had to rely on managers& assessments,
or in-store checks to monitor whether things are running as they should be, but that can be inconsistent, or costly if you do it well
Similarly, messaging has always been slow and clumsy
&The communications between a store and head office have been based around emails,& he said
&The object is to kill the email and replace it with an intelligent task management solution.&
The rise of Yoobic — which actually made
its debut on TechCrunch Disrupt stage— mirrors that of how the retail industry has tried to tap into the advances of technology to make
their operations more efficient, and more profitable, not just to improve the experience but to make sure that brick-and-mortar can keep
pace with whatever advantages online sales, and online sales behemoths like Amazon, might have.
It may be some time before physical commerce
becomes devoid of all human involvement — an endgame that companies like Amazon are already testing — but in the meantime, we&re seeing
innovations likebetter experiences in trying to figure out what might look good on you, how to find what you want in a store, more efficient
check-out flows, and stronger links between purchasingand how users are browsing online
All of those are now being digitised and that creating a vast array of data points that map out a customer digital profile.
While Yoobic
doesn&t directly tie in with the customer experience, the work that it enables definitely makes use of those data points, and contributes to
fulfilling bigger marketing strategies
&For example, say you get data from the point-of-sale system that indicates that sales of Coke are dropping, but you also know you&re about
to have a heatwave,& Haïat explained
&A retailer can use Yoobic to lay out a promotional display for Coke to meet that potential demand and boost sales of the drink in the
process.&
Yoobic also offers an API that can integrate the service into other systems — there are already integrations with Workplace and
Slack,Haïat said, which mean Yoobic itself isn&t used for basic messaging and chat services, just the business of retailing, marketing and
selling.
&The YOOBIC team has created a best-in-class product offering and we are looking forward to working on the company future and
expansion in the US,& saidJeff Lieberman, MD of Insight Venture Partners, in a statement
&We believe solutions like this will become a must-have for retailers, and that YOOBIC has the opportunity and the potential to become the
leader of its category.&
Interestingly, the founders of Yoobic — Fabrice, Avi, and Gilles Haïat, all brothers — are serial
entrepreneurs whose previous startup, Vizelia, was sold to Schneider Electric
It had an interesting parallel to what they have built with Yoobic: it was a energy monitoring solution for buildings
&Initially we were monitoring energy, and now we are monitoring retail,& Fabrice said
&Conceptually, there is a connection.&
