Datasembly lands $16M to give brick-and-mortar retail a big data pricing intelligence boost

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Online shopping often feels like a one-way street from the standpoint of the physical retail world: eCommerce has a wider selection, is open all the time, and there seems to be an endless funnel of data that retailers online can use. to make their offers better and more personalized to each navigating consumer. But since rampant inflation wreaks havoc with any kind of price stability for consumers, it’s not game over either.

data assembly — a startup based in the Virginia suburbs of DC that provides retailers and CPG companies with big data-based analytics on product pricing and promotions, as well as variety insights — has raised $16 million in funding.

The round is a Series B and is led by Noro-Moseley Partners, an Atlanta VC focused on backing tech startups in the southeastern US, with participation from Grotech Ventures, Topmark Partners and Staley Capital. The valuation is not disclosed, but it comes with another interesting socioeconomic context.

This Series B comes almost 3 years after Datasembly raised a $10.3 million Series A led by Craft Venturesclosed round in the middle of covid-19, when many wondered how and if physical stores would get out of the pandemic alive.

As it turned out, brick-and-mortar stores didn’t go away, and many of the ones that did remain standing have definitely become more digitally savvy to improve how they can compete in the broader retail landscape.

That’s where Datasembly comes into the picture. Fittingly, or ironically, for a company that aims to help those who sell products in physical environments better compete with the online world, its power comes from the fact that so much information is available online today: its analytics engine. Big data ingests more than 12 billion prices across some 150,000 online and offline stores weekly, resulting in some 1.2 trillion “total collection observations.”

“The critical information we use is on the web,” CEO and co-founder Ben Reich said in an interview. “We collect on a large scale from the public web, focusing on price, promotion and assortment.”

He noted that retailers and brands have always been focused on collecting this type of information, but in the past it might have been teams of people scouring other brick-and-mortar stores, eventually adding a small selection of online stores to the mix.

That has changed not only because a lot more shopping is now done online, he said.

“The inflationary period we find ourselves in, combined with the economic effects of the pandemic and ongoing supply chain issues, have caused unprecedented volatility,” he said. “As a result, the level of precision in getting a product to market has skyrocketed.” There used to be national pricing zones, he said. “But these have shrunk and shrunk. Individual stores can now have their own price zones.”

And at the product level, he added, everything is now changing “with more speed and granularity than ever before. Therefore, brands and stores need to be more responsive. They are hungry for more information and transparency.”

While some of the world’s largest online retailers, like Amazon, may have all the data and data science muscle they need to do this kind of work in-house, the idea is that many of Datasembly’s prospective customers they might not have it. (Reich would not comment on whether Amazon was a customer of the startup.)

And today, Datasembly already has a sizable business. It works with hundreds of partners (in its newsroom), including some 230 retailers like Target, Walgreens, and Starbucks, and brands and organizations like General Mills, Nestle’s Purina, and the US Food and Drug Administration.

Retailers may be the most obvious category, but the others are just as hungry for this type of data. The FDA tracks and publishes price indices and research, among other work where pricing is critical information; And as for brands, they have long had to deal with a major disconnect when it comes to direct relationships with their consumers. The rise of social media has definitely changed the marketing game for them, and companies like Datasembly are opening the door to further understanding what customers like and don’t like (and don’t buy, or buy).

And that also indicates how Datasembly will use this funding. The plan is to continue to invest in more measures that its customers demand and to expand that customer base overall. For now, Datasembly is primarily focused on consumer packaged goods and groceries, but there’s an obvious opportunity to extend this in all sorts of ways. It could be expanded to retail product types such as clothing, products purchased in bulk (i.e., not by consumers), and beyond goods to the pricing of consumer services.

Interestingly, Datasembly is in the business of business intelligence, but not in the business itself: that is, it doesn’t currently make recommendations on how to price something or how to bundle a promotion; nor does it have any kind of inventory management as part of its platform. Reich said that’s because retailers and brands still have their own individual strategies they can follow: They can have different margin targets; Or they may want, for example, to be intentionally more competitive (cheaper) on specific items to entice shoppers to create larger overall baskets.

Whatever the goal, those companies know they need data to better understand what to do next.

“CPGs and retailers need comprehensive, profitable, real-time data on product pricing and availability,” John Ale, general partner at Noro-Moseley Partners, said in a statement. “Datasembly provides a best-in-class solution, collecting and normalizing billions of data points on a weekly basis. As its customers continue to battle inflation and supply chain issues, Datasembly is critical in powering effective pricing, promotion and assortment decisions.”