BlackCurve, a pricing optimisation company, has closed a GBP1 million funding round, led by Chairman, Martin Fincham, with participation from Nauta Capital, The Cambridge Angels Network and other prominent Angels, members of the ScaleUp Group and then bolstered by a matching contribution from the UK Government’s Future Fund.
Founded in 2016, BlackCurve’s pricing optimisation platform helps retailers manage and optimise the price of every item they sell to achieve their business goals. This SaaS platform, powered by Artificial Intelligence, ingests data sources ranging from sales history and web shop transactions, through to competitor pricing and stock levels, enabling every retailer to create and enforce smart pricing rules for their business.
Fincham says: “We are on a mission to help online retailers find the hidden pockets of profit in their inventory. When a certain e-commerce giant is rumoured to tweak their prices millions of times per day, the issue becomes how can the rest of us possibly keep-up without employing a similarly sized army of data scientists and processing petabytes of data? This additional funding will help to accelerate the application of our A.I-powered solution to solve this conundrum for the rest of us – ordinary retailers.”
Philip Huthwaite, BlackCurve Founder, says: “Last year saw a huge acceleration of online retail. It is no longer possible to manually set prices and stay ahead. BlackCurve is supporting faster growth for forward thinking e-commerce companies.”
BlackCurve serves mid to large multichannel retailers across industries such as sporting equipment, DIY, garden & outdoor, kitchen & home goods, consumer electronics & photography, pet supplies, stationery, automotive parts, toys & games, beauty & healthcare.
Currently, BlackCurve’s pricing platform optimises the prices of over 1m products and executes over 15m price changes per month. This allows retailers to achieve profit margin growth of up to a measured 9 per cent improvement and save both time and resources.
The company intends to use the funds to expand its core team across sales, software development and data science, continue to develop the software and further scale its client base through strategic platform integrations like BigCommerce, Magento and Shopify.
