Digital storefronts have become a matter of course for retailers, but data analytics is proving its worth. Tools that analyze customer data can help build a supply chain, detect fraud, and predict which products will appeal to particular customer segments. Those advantages, as well as their ability to forecast inventory and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, have led to record revenues for predictive analytics software. According to Zion Market Research, the industry made $8.12 billion in 2020 and will make over $4 billion by the year 2028.
Datahawk is a vendor that provides tools for sellers that help increase sales and improve profit margins. Varos is designed to shed light on how companies compare to their peers in terms of customer acquisition costs, and is one of the others.
Black Crow AI, a company that delivers data analytics to retailers, has raised $25 million in a series A round led by Imaginary Ventures with participation from existing investors Primary Venture Partners, and Interlock Partners. Black Crow will use the capital to accelerate development of new and accessible machine learning use cases in both digital commerce and adjacent industries, and expand the team, according to CEO Richard Harris.
Every day, companies of every size are generating unprecedented volumes of real-time data. Their marketing activities include data from their internal operations. Companies can see into the future of their key KPIs via machine-learned predictions if that data can be made sense of with machine learning. The middle market has little access to the same type of talent, tools, and infrastructure as large enterprise companies.
Black Crow was founded in 2020 by Harris and Shehzad Khan, as well as entrepreneur and Travelocity veteran, Damon Tassone. Harris cofounding Site59, which offered last-minute air and hotel weekend packages to mostly domestic destinations. Harris served as the senior vice president of strategy and distribution prior to the purchase of Travelocity in 2015.
Intent was started by Harris, a data science company. Khan worked his way up to the position of chief product officer at Intent. Tassone was the president of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at Travelocity, as well as the deputy CEO at Last Minute and the president of Intent.
The idea behind Black Crow was to create a platform that could deliver predictions that were relevant to the marketplace. Black Crow runs on top of retailers websites and uses streaming event data in customers browsers to train artificial intelligence models and generate predictions while the users are still on the site.
Black Crow is an image.
Black Crow's predictions can be delivered in as little as 15 milliseconds after a user takes action in their browser, according to Harris.
Imagine a world where digital commerce players could accurately know the future value of every prospect that lands on their site from the moment they arrive. We think this is the next big opportunity in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Harris said that user data isn't shared across retailers and that the platform only uses customers' own first-party data. Black Crow retains user data for one year unless a user or brand requests it to be deleted, despite the company's claims that it doesn't share or sell data outside.
Harris explained that the predictions we generate are another unit of the company's first party data.
The vast majority of retailers in a recent study said their employees have the skills to use artificial intelligence. Retail business leaders think that artificial intelligence will have the biggest impact on customer intelligence, inventory management, and customer service in the coming years.
Harris said that companies like Amazon generate huge commercial upside by using real-time streaming data. Customers have stopped relying on the big platforms and data vendors as the data landscape has changed, and instead are making the most of their own first-party data assets.
Retailers are not climbing on the train. Half of the respondents to the survey said they were concerned about the technology, while 75% said they believed it to be hype.
Harris claims that more than 200 companies have Black Crow's integration. Black Crow offers a free 30-day trial, but it's not clear how many of those are paying. Liquid IV and Sakara Life are among the early adopters.
The world moved to digital commerce at exactly the same time that changes in the data landscape made owning and exploiting data in a privacy-friendly way a key priority for companies everywhere.
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