Aforza, which develops cloud and mobile apps for consumer goods businesses, has announced a $22,000,000 Series A round by DN Capital.TechCrunch spoke to Dominic Dinardo, Aforza CEO and co-founder. The company's technology is built using the Salesforce and Google Cloud platforms. This allows consumer goods companies to digitally transform product distribution and customer engagement. It can combat problems like declining market share and unprofitable promotions. The company uses artificial intelligence to recommend products and predict which orders retailers will place with pricing and promotions based on factors such as location.Global sales of consumer packaged goods apps are expected to grow to $15 billion by 2024. Dinardo stated that the industry still uses outdated platforms, which can lead to a loss up to 5% in sales when goods are out-of-stock.The company was founded by Dinardo and Ed Butterworth, his co-founders. They were all Salesforce veterans and saw the need to move to digital in the consumer goods sector.Dinardo's first company leader is Aforza. He feels that he learned a lot from his time at Salesforce.Dinardo stated that the pandemic caused many investors to lean in and validate what Aforza was doing.The consumer goods industry faced many challenges before the pandemic. There were new market entrants, and legacy systems that were not working. But then, the pandemic shut down all avenues to customers. Our mission is to make consumers' lives better by creating sustainable packaging and products, and also to help companies adapt to the changes that are occurring.Bonfire Ventures and Next47 joined DN Capital in this round.Bonfire Ventures partner Brett Queener said that he incubated Aforza with Dinardo and Eales. This is something his firm does not usually do but he saw an opportunity to be a part of the ground floor.He also worked at Salesforce and saw the consumer goods sector as an important industry with compelling reasons to change technology. Customers began expecting instant availability, and tons of startups were entering the direct-to consumers space.These startups don't have the time or resources to build the technology necessary to scale. Queener stated that Aforza allows them to build products that work online and offline on any device. Companies can also make changes to promotional spending in real-time, rather than having them planned on a quarterly schedule.Aforza said it was time to share its technology with the world. He stated that Aforza should expand its footprint in Europe and the U.S., increase R&D, and implement the Salesforce playbook. This is the purpose of this round.Dinardo plans to use the funding to continue R&D as well as to increase its employee headcount in the next six months, while it establishes its U.S. headquarters at the Northeast. It has already worked with customers in 20 different countries.Dinardo stated that he uses his previous experiences with startups such as Veeva and Vlocity (which was acquired by Salesforce in 2020) to help him grow.He said that we have the money and expertise, now we just need to breathe and hire people who are passionate about this, and then invest in new product tiers and digital assets, as well as payments.
