Retail Visual Intelligence Innovator, Infilect Raises $1.5 Million Pre-Series A Funding

Infilect founders. Anand Prabhu Subramanian (left), Vijay Gabale (right)

Infilect, a Retail Visual Intelligence SaaS provider to the worldwide Retail Industry, today announced a $1.5 million pre-series A financing led by Mela Ventures and 1Crowd, with participation from The Chennai Angels (TCA). With the investment, Infilect will expand its go-to market programs, and will continue to invest in the areas of Image Recognition (IR) for retail execution, supply-chain optimization, store personalisation, and category planning.

Infilect was started by Anand Prabhu Subramanian (former Bell Labs and IBM Research) and Vijay Gabale (former IBM Research, PHD IIT Bombay), with the vision of digital transformation of worldwide retail through Image Recognition (IR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the past 18 months, Infilect has super-charged decision making in some of the global Retail Brands in FMCG, Consumer Electronics, Food & Beverages, Home Improvement sectors across geographies.

"Globally today, Retail Brands lack visibility into presence, placement, positioning, and performance of retail products across a large number of retail stores. The final frontiers, the retail shelves, largely remain undigitized, resulting in out-of-stocks and overstocking; a trillion dollar inefficiency worldwide," said Anand Prabhu Subramanian, CEO and co-founder of Infilect. "InfiViz, our flagship product, leverages IR & AI to process pictures of retail shelves from thousands of retail stores in Modern Trade and General Trade markets. InfiViz instantly generates revenue optimising action plans, reduces stock-outs, and consequently, improves same-store sales by 2% to 5%."

"We are excited to be partnering with Mela Ventures, 1Crowd, and TCA. The investment and mentorship will help us build cutting-edge Deep Technology products and boost our enterprise sales in global markets," added Vijay Gabale, CTO and co-founder of Infilect.

"Infilect's products automate traditional retail processes with speed, accuracy, and on a large scale. Thereby, Infilect empowers decision makers in the entire organization, from associates to category owners to sales leaders, with unprecedented insights and actions. We see a great potential in 'team Infilect' to build a world-class Enterprise SaaS company out of India, and we are thrilled to be partnering with Anand and Vijay through our maiden investment," said Parthasarathy N.S, Managing Partner, Mela Ventures.

"Computer Vision technology has the potential to unlock significant value in the retail sector in the areas of retail execution, customers insights and marketing. We are pleased to see Infilect gain confidence of Indian as well as global consumer brands. We are excited to be supporting Anand and Vijay in their quest to digitally transform retail operations worldwide," said Girichandra Kuchangi, Partner, 1Crowd.

"For superior delivery of retail products across multiple channels, Retail Brands need deep insights from visual data in offline stores. Infilect's founders have unique research and technology background to create magical experiences and extract meaningful actions from visual data captured in diverse retail environments," added Lakshmi Narayanan, Co-Founder, Cognizant and a Chennai Angel investor. In conjunction with the investment round, Rostow Ravanan, an IC Member of Mela Ventures, will be joining Infilect's board of directors.

About Infilect

Infilect is an Enterprise SaaS provider for retail manufacturers, retail brands, and retailers. With innovations In Image Recognition and AI, Infilect's products empower the retail industry with unprecedented visibility into omni-channel sales, in-store merchandising and store operations. Infilect is trusted by global customers and partners, and is backed by Mela Ventures, 1Crowd, The Chennai Angels. Infilect is part of Nasscom Deep Tech Club, Intel India's Maker Lab Program, IITB-SINE's Plugin Accelerator, and NVIDIA's Inception program. For more information, visit https://www.infilect.com.


About Mela Ventures

Mela Ventures Trust is a SEBI-approved AIF Category-2 fund for the early stage companies. With a goal to build next-gen entrepreneurs, the fund focuses on building a portfolio in areas, such as AI/ML, AR/VR, IoT, Cloud Migration and Deep Technologies. Mela Ventures was founded by Industry veterans, Krishnakumar Natarajan and Parthasarathy NS who have co-founded Mindtree and taken it from a startup to a multi-billion- dollar market cap enterprise.

About 1Crowd

1Crowd is an early-stage venture capital fund and an angel platform that offers an institutionalized approach to investing in start-ups. Over the last 5 years, 1Crowd has created a unique ecosystem that brings together accredited investors and mentors with rich experience and expertise, to support founders at various stages of their start-up journey. 1Crowd manages investments of over ₹ 100 crores in 31 exciting start-ups across sectors ranging from enterprise-tech and deep-tech to B2C. The targeted AUM of its maiden sector-agnostic fund from which it is currently investing is ₹ 75 crores. For more information, visit https://www.1crowd.co/.

About TCA

The Chennai Angels (TCA), is one of India's most active angel investing groups. Founded in the year 2007, it is comprised of successful entrepreneurs and business leaders with a track record of starting and scaling large enterprises. Additionally, several seed and venture capital firms hold institutional membership in the group. TCA portfolio companies benefit from the collective expertise and rolodex of its members.

Tech and Analytics Redefine Retail Execution for Brands and Retailers in New Normal: Study

COVID-19 continues to disrupt consumer markets though demand is almost back to normal in most parts of India. The second edition of Bizom's COVID-19 Impact India report shares insights on the performance of the market from April to June as consumer businesses start to recover with easing of the lockdowns.

To develop the report, Bizom analysed data from approximately 30% of the retail universe across 400 districts, 2000 towns and cities of India, which covers a population of 800+ million.

From market data of the last 10 weeks, it is clear that recovery is well and truly underway. However, a few categories - Beverages and Personal Care continue to struggle and will see a massive impact on their sales volumes. Brands are adapting to the new normal by changing their route to market models and through large scale digital transformation of their supply chains.

[caption id="attachment_148842" align="aligncenter" width="611"] Chart 01: Week-wise breakup of demand from transacting outlets[/caption]

Also, rural India is recovering faster and average sales for rural was 40% higher than urban in June. Focus on rural is paramount for brands to drive growth and recover lost sales. The research involved analysing total sales data of 87 cities including metros, state capitals, B class cities etc.

[caption id="attachment_148843" align="aligncenter" width="486"] Chart 2: Demand break up in rural vs urban areas[/caption]

First among the key trends is the change in buying patterns from distributors, stockists and retailers. These channel partners are moving away from monthly and fortnightly replenishments of their stocks to weekly cycles. The trend is driven by a range of factors including stock availability and ability to give credit in the market among others.

Many brands are re-inventing trade models as they look to combat disruptions in their supply chains. They are relying on internal and external data, and investments in digital technologies to make strategic decisions that can improve their retail execution. They are beginning to rely on data insights to target stores with limited availability of their products. To enhance their customer targeting capabilities, they are using hyper-local data to identify regions and stores that are open in containment zones or are transacting even in times of lockdown. They are also signing up with tech-driven logistics partners to drive last mile order fulfilment.

To power these strategic changes, consumer brands are depending on digital technologies such as self-service apps where retailers can send their orders directly to the brand. Conversational commerce is fast gaining popularity where brands are engaging with consumers through WhatsApp and redirecting them to the nearest store that stocks the brand's products. These technological changes are aimed to make remote retail execution possible where all stakeholders in the downstream supply chain are digitised and salespeople can conduct their business on phone and through on-call solutions.

Performance across categories is almost back to normal levels though some regional and category variances exist. For example, Packaged Foods which saw a surge immediately after the first lockdown is now down by approximately 20%. However, it is Beverages that was most affected with almost 40% loss of sales at its peak season in April and May. Regionally, South India is performing better than other regions. West is lagging behind in recovery which is in line with the high incidence of COVID-19 cases in the region.

Brands are changing their RTM strategies in a bid to recover lost ground. Some of these changes include simplification of the supply chain. Sales data from April and May shows that brands are consolidating their product portfolio for operational reasons. They are focused on a smaller number of SKUs and fewer product launches. Consumers who are feeling the pinch of lowering incomes are also shifting to lower priced products or smaller pack sizes. The silver lining in the gloomy insights is that data from June shows that the industry is moving back to pre-lockdown levels and number of lines trading is now only approximately 10% as compared to February 2020.

[caption id="attachment_148844" align="aligncenter" width="628"] Chart 3: Variation in demand for low, medium and high-value SKUs between pre-lockdown and unlock-1[/caption]

A significant number of Bizom's customers across categories are investing heavily in digital technologies to improve their decision making and to bring more transparency in their supply chains. It includes digitisation of channel partners, investments in B2B E-commerce, remote retail execution and more. There are clear signs that B2B E-commerce is becoming an important channel for brands with categories of home care, confectionery, packaged goods and more.

Unsurprisingly, many brands are launching hygiene products which are completely outside their product portfolio. 5-10% consumer brands have launched new hand sanitisers and masks to support the COVID-19 demand.

Bizom's COVID-19 Impact report points to shifts in the consumption patterns but it's too early to say if these changes are here to stay.

For a detailed report, write to marketing@mobisy.com.

Retail Intelligence Firm Bizom on the Secrets of Building a Growing India 1st SaaS Business

This year, Bizom, a retail intelligence SaaS company, will exceed $5M in annual revenue with more than 95% generated from Indian customers. They are one of the very few (if not the only) SaaS companies in India to do so.

Bizom, a retail intelligence platform, is one of the few (if not only) SaaS companies to generate more than $5 million in annual revenue of which 95% was generated from Indian customers alone

The company has more than 350 enterprise CPG brands as its customers, and over 150K distributors and sales executives use its platform. Thanks to the $10 billion worth of CPG business that passes through its platform, Bizom captures the data of more than 5 million unique retailers in India.

These are all impressive figures given that building a fast-growing SaaS business with only Indian customers is often considered "mission impossible". Here is the "art of war" if you want to pursue a similar mission.

From its early days, Bizom adopted the "inch wide mile deep" focus. According to Lalit Bhise, CEO and Co-founder of Bizom, it's about channelling the company's resources to win a significant market share in a small segment rather than spreading the business too thin. From the beginning, Bizom wanted to be a market leader. But they decided to be a market leader in small regions or small segments rather than have a "worldwide" focus.

Lalit and his team broke down the universe of CPG into mini verticals like beverages or fresh foods and regions like Mumbai and Bangalore. "We did not even start selling Bizom to Mumbai-based customers until we had more than 10% market share in our home market in Bangalore. We expanded to Delhi only when we had a good market share in Bangalore and Mumbai. Only in 2019, when we were the undisputed leaders in this space in India did we started looking outside," commented Lalit.

The company's focused approach made sure the sales and marketing rupees were spent to create maximum impact. It also generated word-of-mouth referrals in their focus markets which is critical in India. Mid-market companies base their buying decisions on referrals which the company was able to leverage with its "inch wide mile deep" approach.

Today, the company adds 10-15 new customers each month, more than 90% of which are inbound via referrals.

When Lalit started Bizom, industry experts told him that India is a price-conscious market. It would be difficult to build a large SaaS business. What Lalit and his team discovered though was that India is not as price-conscious as it is value-conscious. Customers are willing to pay for the right product as long as Bizom could customise the platform to meet their needs.

Bizom sold its platform as a customised product from day one. That was the secret sauce. They built a configurable platform which behaves differently for each customer or product line despite having one codebase for all their customers. It is a technological feat, and the credit goes to the company's engineering and product teams.

This innovation has poised the company to win in global markets. What is perceived as a complex customisation challenge, Bizom executes with a click of a button. In a market where six months is a norm to onboard a product or platform, the company consistently takes two weeks to go live. This platform approach has helped the company grow fast and expand its customer base.

"I have seen a lot of SaaS companies attempting to acquire large enterprise customers before achieving "product-market fit". I think It's suicidal. We started working with tech-oriented CPG startups like iD Fresh. The growth achieved through our tech helped put us in the next orbit of mid-market companies like Parle Agro, Jyothy Laboratories, Fena, etc. From there, we made inroads into MNCs like Reckitt, Mars, Hershey's, Pepsico, etc. But going up the value chain is not just about acquiring customers. It involves continually adapting our creativity, thoughts and approach to the needs of each industry segment. While ensuring, we retain the sanctity of scalable, repeatable and automated solutions. We call this organisation wide culture of constant learning as Algorithmic Jugaad," said Lalit.

Every year, at least half of Bizom's growth comes from existing customers alone. The secret behind it is the company's customer success team. Unlike most other SaaS companies, their customer success team is made of business analysts and not glorified support executives. These business analysts help customers drive their business outcomes using Bizom. They measure success by the success of their customers. Since no one expects software vendors to help drive business outcomes, customers are satisfied and expand the scope of business year-on-year, and continue to give the company rave reviews and referrals.

While in retrospect, this all sounds simple, there is one thing that makes this possible, the team and the culture Bizom has built within the organisation. As a company, they follow People=>Product=>Profits philosophy. Which means they want to work with the right entrepreneurial people with the hope that they will build a great product that brings revenues and profits. If there is one thing Lalit will tell SaaS companies is to focus on working with the right team throughout their journey.

Bizom provides insights and intelligence to CPG brands and has just started to make inroads into other emerging markets. The company helps brands achieve smart distribution by tapping into its vast network, and by improving the customer's manpower efficiency, channel performance and product performance.

It first helps businesses to digitise the customer's entire sales functions and supply chain. Once the digital transformation is activated, the company helps its customers move from a push-based distribution to a pull-based distribution using solutions that facilitate assisted- and inspired-selling.

Mobisy Technologies

Mobisy Technologies was founded in 2008 by Lalit Bhise, an early inventor of hybrid mobile programming. He also has patents pending in visual merchandising using image recognition. He is an expert on the Indian FMCG industry having worked closely with market leaders to advise and then actually solve their sales and distribution problems. His motto is to disrupt the retail industry using technology in a manner that helps the entire retail ecosystem move ahead digitally.

Mobisy uses the mantra of Algorithmic Jugaad whereby it places a very high value on entrepreneurship to drive greater success among customers.

Today, Mobisy is one of the fastest growing tech brands in India. The accolades speak for themselves:

Ranked 3rd fastest growing technology company in India at Deloitte Technology Fast 50, 2017

Ranked 43 in Financial Times’ 1000 High-Growth Companies Asia-Pacific list for 2018

Highly rated by customers (4.6/5) on Gartner peer insights

Top 3 in the Accenture Consumer Tech awards.

Bizom

Bizom, a Mobile first, SaaS-based suite of automation solutions, is the retail intelligence platform for brands and their retailers.

We are leaders in providing insights and intelligence to CPG brands in India and emerging markets and are now making inroads into markets in Europe and other developed markets. We help brands achieve smart distribution by improving their manpower efficiency, channel performance and product performance.

We achieve this by helping businesses first digitise their entire sales and supply chain and later help the move from a push-based distribution to a pull-based distribution using solutions that facilitate assisted and inspired selling.

Its customers include international brands such as Reckitt-Benckiser, Hershey’s, Nivea, Mars as well as top Indian brands such as Parle Agro, Jyothy Laboratories Limited, JK Helene-Curtis, Parag Milk Foods, among a fast-growing list of over 350 brands.

~ NewsVoir