Stonehenge Technology Labs hopes that data collected by consumer packaged goods companies will be meaningfully used. It announced $2 million seed funding to support its STOPWATCH commerce enhancement program.
The round was led and participated in by Irish Angels. Gaingels and Angeles Investors were also present. Bonfire Ventures and Red Tail Venture Capital were also part of the group.
After working as a digital transformation specialist at Hallmark, Meagan Kinmonth-Bowman, the Arkansas-based CEO, founded the company in 2019.
She explained to TechCrunch that this was not because they weren't good marketers or connected with mom. However, they didn't have the technology to connect to retailers like Hobby Lobby, Walmart, and Amazon. There are many talented people who create products that connect with consumers. Problem is that the big guys do things in the same way as the 13-year olds who are winning the space on social media.
Kinmonth Bowman and her colleagues recognized that there was an invisible middle layer linking the dotcom world with brick and mortar. She said that a company could become just as profitable online if it could integrate private and public data feeds and apply enterprise resource plans.
Stonehenges' answer is STOPWATCH. It takes in more than 100 million rows per workspace per day and analyzes them, adding real-time alerts, and providing the correct data to the right people at exactly the right time.
B2B SaaS investor Dan Rossignol said that the CPG industry is about consumersizing our lives. The global pandemic proved that people can have a productive life and a business. Rossignol loves to invest in undervalued founders, and saw in Stonehenge an organization that is bringing CPGs out of beneath outdated technologies.
He said that Meagan's team is doing something really exciting. It is all about the people and the possibility of doing more.
Kinmonth Bowman stated that she was offered the chance to establish the company in Silicon Valley but decided to locate it in Bentonville, Arkansas to be near the more than 1000 CPG companies there, which she believed were the best customer base for STOPWATCH.
The original platform was created by a consulting company as a subsidiary. However, in 2018, one client told Stonehenge that they wanted the software and not the consulting. Stonehenge was forced to go underground for eight months in order to create a custom software product for the client.
Kinmonth Bowman acknowledges that the technology isn't very sophisticated. It uses exact transfer loads to extract data out of hundreds of systems and place it in a lake house. Then, it silos it by retailer and other factors before presenting it in different ways. The CEO may want different metrics from the product teams.
The company has seen its revenue double and contracts double in the last year. The company already has several Fortune 100 companies and emerging brands among its early customers. It plans to use the new financing to hire a sales team, and pursue strategic relationships.
Kinmonth Bowman stated that Stonehenge is working to create a diverse workforce that is similar to the users of the software. She acknowledged that it has been difficult to find unique talent for Arkansas, but she is willing to tackle this challenge.
Brett Brohl is the managing partner of Bread and Butter Ventures. He said that Stonehenge's team is smart enough to be crazy and motivated to create something amazing.
He said that while all the largest companies have been around for a long period of time, not many large organizations have done a great job digitizing their business. They were already building digital transformations that fill in the blank, even before COVID. But COVID increased technology and hit many companies hard. This was more apparent to consumers which makes it more difficult for companies to grasp the need. STOPWATCH is happy about this. The process went from paper to Excel spreadsheets and onto the next cloud modification. It is time to take the next step and learn how to use data.
