This month we reached an important milestone as we announced that Snowflake, the world-leading data platform, has invested in our business, via Snowflake Ventures.
A watershed moment.
We join an incredible line-up of companies in the Snowflake Ventures investment portfolio, including DataIku, Matillion, Sigma and ThoughtSpot. A common thread is how these businesses mobilize data for their customers, helping them run more profitable, efficient, and successful companies.
This investment marks an inflection point for HyperFinity in our scaling journey. It serves as validation that our decision intelligence platform, people and business model have what it takes to deliver success.
It all started with beers in Bundobust.
Initially it was an entrepreneurial itch. A feeling that there must be a better way. We’d spent years working for major retailers, media companies and in data science and tech companies. We found incumbent retail analytics software slow, expensive, and difficult to use. In fact, impossible to use, unless you have coding skills.
The alternative wasn’t much better: major, traditional management consultancies who charge the earth and deliver very little practical value.
We spoke with our industry peers and found there to be widespread dissatisfaction. An Executive at one of the world’s largest CPG companies described a market leader, and now HyperFinity competitor, as ‘a big expensive mess’. This was the point we realized it was time to act.
So back to Bundobust, a popular spot with the hipsters of Leeds. For several Friday evenings we hatched a plan over craft beer and Indian street food. That plan ultimately became HyperFinity.
Helping retailers make intelligent decisions. Simple.
The products they sell, who they sell them to, how they sell them and the price they charge determine whether retailers will survive and thrive in an incredibly challenging environment. We know this from first-hand knowledge gained working in retail businesses.
This represents a set of interlinked decisions retailers need to get right. To make great decisions requires deep customer insight, gleaned through data science and AI. The challenge here is recruiting skilled data technicians is extremely tough. Finding those with specific knowledge of how to solve retail challenges with data is like finding a needle in a haystack.
We established HyperFinity to help solve this challenge. To provide software and services that enable retailers to make great commercial decisions, informed by data science and AI.
HyperFinity + Snowflake, bringing value through the Retail Data Cloud.
When working as retail practitioners, one of our biggest pain points was the glacial pace of processing and analysing large datasets in legacy software platforms. It literally took days to run big data queries, particularly on basket level retail data. This wasn’t conducive to rapid, data-informed decision making.
Snowflake’s Retail Data Cloud changes this. It enables ultra-high-speed ingestion, processing and querying of data at near unlimited scale. HyperFinity’s decision intelligence platform is powered by Snowflake, allowing our clients to generate insights at extreme speed and rapidly make data informed decisions.
Snowflake clearly recognised the value of HyperFinity, naming us a finalist from hundreds of entries in their 2022 Start-up of the Year Challenge, followed by their investment in our business.
Democratizing access to data science and AI for retailers.
There’s an extremely low barrier to entry for getting started with HyperFinity. We connect two simple data feeds and provide powerful tools to automate feature engineering and ETL. Our highly visual, no-code user interface combines powerful data science with business intelligence. It uncovers crucial insights and powers data-led decisions to push downstream to any orchestration platform (such as a CRM).
We built HyperFinity with cost effective scalability in mind. But we never deviated from our core objective: providing clients with speedy, powerful tools to enable them to make important decisions, quickly.
Our serverless architecture means there’s no need to provision, purchase and manage backend infrastructure or employ the human resource needed to support it. It enables us to create extremely scalable and powerful processes in a much more cost-effective manner.
Being serverless itself, Snowflake has been a core part of our architecture from day one. With new features such as Snowpark and the SQL API we can build machine learning and data pipelines natively within the data-warehouse, push them instantly to our front-end and then create simple outputs for connection to any CRM, CMS, ERP or other downstream systems.
Having worked in and with data science teams our whole careers and witnessed the explosion in demand for data driven insight first hand, our technology partnership with Snowflake brings to life an incredible opportunity.
Snowflake Ventures accelerates HyperFinity’s growth.
We have immediately put Snowflake’s investment to work. It’s become increasingly clear what retailers value in the companies they work with. Of paramount importance is retai-specific industry expertise; a high-performance software platform that’s accessible to business and technical users, and a complimentary service offering that’s pragmatic and delivers real results at a fair price.
Our retail customers and prospects have also provided clear direction on their priority use cases. First party data activation for retail media; pricing and intelligent markdown, and demand forecasting to minimise excess stock all feature.
Snowflake’s investment helps us double down on developing key product features, supporting our customers with expert consultancy, and creating demand for our decision intelligence platform.
Building on a strong partnership.
Our partnership with Snowflake goes from strength to strength. From working closely with their go-to-market teams, building strong relationships with partnerships and product development teams, to meeting other Snowflake Ventures portfolio companies.
Snowflake’s focus on the Retail Data Cloud, an ecosystem to help retailers and brands collaborate, and access best of breed technology and consulting companies, is music to our ears.
We’re already seeing great traction in the market, helping world-leading retailers such as Asda, Costa and Hotel Chocolat apply data science and AI to deliver exceptional customer experiences and in turn, increase their revenue and profit.
We’re truly excited about the years ahead as we create value for our retail customers and accelerate the growth of Snowflake and HyperFinity.
