Cerebra, which provides analytics to marketers and merchandisers, nabs $15M

Early in the pandemic, as many enterprises looked to digitally transform their operations, marketing and merchandising departments turned to AI to automate the increasing workloads. According to Salesforce, marketers’ use of AI soared between 2018 and 2020, jumping from 29% in 2018 to 84% in 2020. A separate survey from ManageEngine — the IT division of Zoho — found that analytics for marketing, driven by automation and AI, experienced a 44% adoption surge in over the past two years.

Retail and consumer products executives, responding to a recent IBM survey, said that they believe that intelligent automation capabilities could help increase annual revenue growth by up to 10%. Adopters in marketing cite benefits like accelerating revenue as well as getting actionable insights from marketing data. In fact, that’s the sales pitch of Cerebra, a platform designed to provide “data-driven direction” to marketing teams by analyzing “external signals” and applying this to companies’ internal data.

Cerebra today announced that it raised $15 million in a series A round led by Notion Capital. Deger Turan, cofounder and CEO, says that the financing will be used to expand Cerebra’s workforce and support R&D efforts.

Marketing automation

Turan, a founder at San Francisco, California-based venture fund Atomic, launched Cerebra in 2018 after a brief stint as a software engineer at data analytics company Palantir. He claims that Cerebra’s technology can analyze external and internal data sources, marry them together with algorithms, and provide insights to drive marketing outcomes based on business goals.

For example, he says, Cerebra can predict optimal product stock allocations based on sales forecasts and discover which discounts to offer to which customers for products expected to see a drop in sales. Ostensibly, platform can also identify the best-performing discounts for each campaign and spot abnormal return rates — automatically adjusting “problematic” product descriptions.

“Cerebra … provides retail professionals with timely recommendations with predicted business impact instead of more data requiring time and effort to interpret,” Turan said in a statement. “This enables retailers to not only grow profitability but do so in a sustainable manner. After all, sustainability and profitability are not two opposing drivers — they actually go hand-in-hand when you utilize the right tools.”

From the data it collects, Cerebra attempts to find out which customers are ready to buy and win back customers potentially at risk of churn. The platform can also create product bundles and promote cross-sales — i.e., encouraging customers to purchase products in addition to the original items that they intended to purchase — based on customer behavior, product affinity, and price preferences.

“Cerebra automatically analyses web trends and transaction data for merchandisers and recommends optimizations to sell more products and reduce inventory waste,” the company explains on its website. “By combining data silos and serving as a single source of truth, teams can coordinate their efforts to boost sales, minimize inventory waste and engage customers effectively.”

Growing automation

Cerebra, which offers plugins for existing ecommerce ecosystems like Shopify, competes with startups like Constructor, Zoovu, and Klevu in the growing marketing and merchandising automation segment. Klevu applies AI to help ecommerce merchants deliver search experiences powered by customers’ behaviors. Similarly, Constructor’s AI-powered software aims to address the challenges with discovery tools including search, autosuggest, browse, recommendations, and collections by aggregating data and learning from shoppers’ search queries.

Gartner predicted that at least 60% of organizations would start using AI for digital commerce by 2020. But not every company is so eager. RMG reports that 12% of senior merchants have “no plans” to adopt AI as of 2021, due to a lack of expertise to manage a pilot, high costs, unorganized data, and a lack of understanding about the benefits of AI.

Cerebra investor Itxaso del Palacio, partner at Notion Capital, asserts that Cerebra is well-positioned to overcome the hurdles that it faces.

“In order for retail leaders to stay ahead of competition, brands need to be able to listen to customers and adjust their operational processes to react instantly to rising searches and new trends,” he said in a press release. “We are excited to partner with the Cerebra team to support their ambition of shaping a sustainable world where everybody can make better decisions, providing retail leaders actionable, data-driven answers without the need for a data team to be working around the clock.”