Rubikloud scores $37 million investment to bring intelligence to retail industry
The retail industry is one that’s rife for disruption by technology. Under intense pressure from giants like Amazon and Walmart, retailers are often stuck using legacy systems and are ill-equipped to compete using the latest tools. Rubikloud announced a $37 million investment today to help retailers attack the modernization problem with cloud tools built with artificial intelligence underpinnings.
The round was led by Intel Capital with participation from new investors Inovia Capital and OTEAF along with previous investors Horizons Ventures and Access Industries. Today’s investment brings the total to $47 million, according to the company.
Intel in particular is trying to get a foothold inside of retail where they hope to promote their Internet of Things strategy. They believe that by combining their IoT knowledge with Rubikloud’s intelligent automation and data processing, it will generate a powerful partnership. For starters, they hope to attack three areas of retail with this approach including the supply chain, the corporate front office and inside stores themselves.
Rubikloud offers a series of SaaS products including a promotions tool and a customer lifecycle manager to help retailers provide more personalized promotions and track their customers through the entire retail lifecycle. They also offer a couple of more nuts and bolts tools including RubiCore, which is designed to help companies ingest and validate data from their existing systems and move their data into Rubikloud’s proprietary data model. Finally they offer RubiOne, which is a set of machine learning tools and libraries designed to help retailers build their own machine learning applications on top of the Rubikloud data set.
The idea is to use the applications the company has provided to help retailers improve promotions and better understand their customers, while giving them the ability to build their own customized applications as well.
This appears to be a solid approach, but the company is far from alone in this space as it’s competing with giants like Adobe and a host of other startups. Regardless, investors obviously liked what they saw and have pumped in a lot of money to help in that regard.
The company plans to use the money from this round for worldwide expansion with a focus on opening offices in Europe and Asia.
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