An artificial intelligence (AI) startup of develop real-time data analysis of sales for retailers has raised $4 million in a Seed round led by Square Peg.
GoodWork.ai is working with global retailers to build analytics AI for retail merchandise, finance and operations teams to make trade performance analysis fast and easy.
The AI analyses the impact of everything from promotion changes to the weather on a retailer’s performance to generate answers in seconds on what happened and why performance changed, also quantifying the impact.
The platform was cofounded 12 months ago by Matthew Smith, a decade-long partner of Boston Consulting Group’s global retail team, AI for retail developer Alex Bergsaker, and Ric Porteous, a BCG data scientist. They’ve also recruited another veteran BCG retail data scientist, Adam Whybrew, as director of research.
They believe Goodwork has the potential to save big retailers 1000s of hours in manual analysis weekly and unlock a new way of running retail businesses.
In his investment notes announcing the raise, Square Peg partner James Tynan said it was “a pretty wild thing ” to learn an industry that spends $6 billion on everything from data warehouses to consultancies.
“If you ask retailers about these tools what you’ll hear is a list of what they don’t do. My favourite quote: ‘Retail plus analytics does not equal retail analytics.’,” he said.
“The truth is the tech industry has largely failed to deliver on the promise that ‘big data’ would transform retail.”
Tynan said GoodWork is “a different animal” to other ‘insights’ tool.
“They are building their own proprietary models to replicate the brains of the world’s best retail analysts. They’re using LLMs to provide an interface to those models so that real humans on the team can work in partnership with the AI analyst to dig into the ‘why’,” he said.
“What this enables is a lightning-fast, unified source of truth combined with an ‘always on’ analyst that deeply understands retail and can provide answers in seconds or alert the team to issues before they even know to ask the question.”
Smith declined to comment on the raise when approached by Startup Daily, saying “we’re very deep in product development”.
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