Askuity Announces $3 Million Funding Round
Askuity has revealed the closing of a $3 million growth funding round to fuel continued expansion.
The latest round of funding for the Toronto-based retail sales enablement platform is a follow-on to prior investments by dunnhumby and the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund. Early last year Askuity raised a $2 million Series A with dunnhumby.
As companies grow their in-store and online presence, they need a way to manage the data collected from customers. Askuity has risen through the ranks to become a leading solution for the world’s consumer brands, including Bosch, Philips and more. The new funding will go towards building out the platform’s functionality to drive growth in their retail channels.
“We’re going to focus on building data-infused, execution-oriented applications—on top of all of the insights and data that we already collect— to really become the core sales enablement application of our customer’s retail sales team,” says Eric Green, the co-founder and CEO of Askuity.
The goal for Askuity is to empower their client’s sales and marketing teams to become more important partners for their retailer customers. This happens through optimized product merchandising and improved marketing effectiveness. The way Askuity will build on this with new financing is by employing AI into their platform.
“What we do well is descriptive and exploratory analytics. Askuity gives people a sense of where the opportunities and challenges with their business are and what they should stay ahead of,” says Green. “But with all that data there’s a real opportunity to move upstream into predictive analytics to tell you what’s going to happen, and prescriptive analytics, like what should be happening and what should your company focus on.”
Enabling AI and machine learning into the Askuity platform will enable brands to understand what their data is really telling them. This allows companies to become proactive and get ahead of problems quickly.
Green mentions that Askuity is touted by customers as the “best-kept secret” in retail, and they jokingly plead with the company to not offer the platform to other brands. The full suite of insight-driven applications on the Askuity platform will only grow as AI and other expansion plans are implemented.
Askuity currently does most of their business in the U.S., with some key Canadian clients as well. There are no immediate plans to grow internationally as platform expansion is at the forefront of the company right now.
