Data analytics is showing its utility in the post-pandemic period when internet storefronts have become the norm for merchants. Client data analysis tools may help with inventory management, supply chain management, fraud detection, and predicting which items will appeal to specific customer segments.
These benefits, as well as their capacity to estimate inventories and analyze the efficiency of marketing initiatives, have propelled predictive analytics software sales to new highs. The predictive analytics market generated $8.12 billion in 2020, according to Zion Market Research, and is expected to produce $39.1 billion by 2028.
In the data analytics for the e-commerce industry, a number of suppliers compete, including DataHawk, which provides solutions for sellers that presumably assist them to improve sales by improving profit margins. Others include Trsel, which promises to provide small businesses with the same statistics as bigger online shops, and Varos, which tries to show how businesses compare to their rivals in terms of client acquisition expenses. Black Crow AI, a relatively young business that provides data analytics to retailers, revealed today that it has secured $25 million in a Series A round-headed by Imaginary Ventures, with previous investors Primary Venture Partners, Bloomberg Beta, Interlock Partners, and Vast Ventures participating.
Black Crow will utilize the funding to “accelerate the development of new and accessible machine learning use cases in both digital commerce and adjacent sectors” and grow the workforce across “product, client support, and commercial,” according to CEO Richard Harris. “Everyone understands that businesses of all sizes are generating massive amounts of real-time data every day. Data comes from their internal operations, customers, suppliers, and marketing efforts. And, if that data can be interpreted using machine learning, firms may “actually look into the future of their important KPIs using machine-learned predictions,” Harris told TechCrunch via email.
“Black Crow is concentrating on the underserved middle market. The issues are similar to those faced by major enterprises, but the middle market has little to no access to the same people, tools, and infrastructure as large enterprises.” Black Crow, situated in New York, was created in 2020 by Travelocity veterans Harris and Shehzad Khan, as well as entrepreneur Damon Tassone. Before co-founding Site59, Harris worked as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group and sold last-minute air-and-hotel weekend packages to largely domestic locations. Prior to Expedia’s purchase of Travelocity in 2015, Harris was SVP of strategy and distribution at Site59, which was purchased for $43 million in 2002 by Travelocity.
Harris also founded Intent, a data science firm that works with online travel companies. Khan worked at a number of businesses, including Stable and Rocket Fuel Inc., before joining Intent as chief product officer. Tassone was the deputy CEO of travel retailer Last Minute and the president of Intent before co-founding Site59 and serving as the president of EMEA at Travelocity. Black Crow was conceived as a platform that could give e-commerce-relevant predictions using an API that could be integrated with current workflows, tools, and software.
While customers are still on the site, Black Crow operates on top of merchants’ websites and leverages streaming event data from their browsers to train AI models and make predictions (such as which product a buyer is likely to buy). Black Crow’s forecasts, which include churn, customer experience, and marketing expenditure, may be supplied in as little as 15 milliseconds after a user takes action in their web browser, and then fed into “all-important business processes,” according to Harris.
