By changing the way they research and buy products, consumers are moving outside the marketing funnel. Consequently, startups are using AI to analyse customer behaviour without invading their privacy and enabling retailers to gain valuable insights into their customers’ needs and preferences and allowing them to tailor their marketing strategies better. This could result in higher customer satisfaction and increased sales.
AssetFloow, a startup based in Lisbon, Portugal, has raised €1.5 million to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technology that describes consumer behaviour in a store without cameras or sensors.
The investment came from GED Ventures and will allow AssetFloow to triple its research and development team in Portugal, expand to Europe and South America, and consolidate its position as a market leader in behavioural analytics.
AssetFloow was founded in 2021 by Katya Ivanova and Ricardo Santos to provide the first software solution that combines Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Behavioral Analysis. The platform generates consumer paths in the store and their interactions with products, allowing an analysis of purchase patterns and behaviours.
So how does it work?
With AssetFloow, you can create a ‘Digital Twin’ of your current store or simulate one, providing information like heat maps, consumer paths, suggestions on how to place products/categories to boost sales, promotional campaign strategies, anomalies in sales, and new products to add to the store, among others.
Further, the AssetFloow Behavioral AI solution enables retailers and CPG companies to identify consumer segments and improve the in-store customer experience.
In 2021, AssetFloow won an Artificial Intelligence Hackathon in Finland, and the Entrepreneurship Awards named it the Most Promising Startup in Portugal in 2022. As part of its research and development work in Portugal, it was also certified as suitable by the National Innovation Agency. As of today, AssetFloow operates in Europe (Portugal, Spain, UK, Italy) and Brazil.
Recent global events and changing purchasing patterns are forcing retailers to increase their efforts to attract consumers to their stores. As a result of the profitability of in-store sales and the fact that personal interactions with brands tend to establish stronger relationships with consumers, brands tend to gain more trust and loyalty from consumers.
According to Katya Ivanova, co-founder and CEO of AssetFloow: “The product revolutionises how retailers analyse what’s happening in their physical stores. Retailers have never had access to a solution that enables them to understand consumer behaviour in real-time at scale, without compromising privacy, by store or cluster.
She concluded, “One of our European clients, for example, needed to hire a team to manually track consumers in their stores and generate heatmaps based on people’s paths, which cost tens of thousands of euros per week. The same client obtained the same results in seconds using AssetFloow. The platform detected behavioural changes three months before the retailer’s team, contributing to increased sales in Brazil’s scenario of strong inflation impact.”
