Stockholm-based Dema.ai has just raised €4 million to address a growing challenge for e-commerce players – achieving profitable growth. The tech startup has developed a no-code tool to provide smaller e-commerce brands with data insights that will enhance their outreach campaigns and boost revenues.
E-commerce had a few years in the spotlight, but now, many smaller players are struggling to keep up and be seen in the crowd. Competing against multinational enterprises and coming up against ever-concerning economic turmoil, small to medium-sized e-commerce and DTC brands are now starting to struggle.
Achieving profitable growth in e-commerce isn’t easygoing. Part of the problem? The traditional way of operating e-commerce – has a misleading top-line focus to improve high-level metrics around traffic and sales. Instead, e-commerce players should focus on targeting the right customer, selling the right inventory and at the right time in order to maximize operational profitability.
Doing so requires a comprehensive and well-conceived outreach strategy across sales and marketing and careful navigation of digital advertisement. Over the last few years, though, significant changes in the digital advertisement space have resulted in worse online marketing efficiency with higher advertising costs, reduced profitability, and less transparency for companies dependent on 3rd party data.
Aiming to address this, making it easier for companies to evaluate, design and execute efficient marketing campaigns is Dema.ai. Founded earlier this year, the startup has just picked up pre-seed funding to scale.
The details:
- €4 million was raised in a pre-seed round led by J12 Ventures
- High-profile angel investors including Jacob Hellqvist (ex-Epidemic Sound & Foodora CFO), Johan Bendz (ex-Zettle CMO & Juni Chairman), Erik Segerborg (ex-Avito deputy CEO & Hemnet CSO), and angel collective Framtid also participated
Achieve profitable growth in real-time
Founded by Marcus Tagesson, Henrik Hoffman, and David Feldell, Dema.ai is building real-time analytics tools for small to medium-sized e-commerce and DTC brands with the aim of transforming the e-commerce space, bringing smaller brands more chances to thrive.
Marcus Tagesson, co-founder at Dema.ai: “We created Dema.ai because we had seen the struggles firsthand when building my previous company that grew from 0 to over 120 million EUR in GMV. Many e-commerce companies today are looking at the wrong metrics, and It’s more important than ever to get in control of your profitable customer cohorts, inventory, and cash flow in real-time. This is the future of driving an online business, and we want to make Dema.ai universally accessible to all e-commerce.”
Based in Stockholm, the team has built a no-code tool that helps gather all commercial data, cleans and structures it. Once the data has been processed and cleaned, Dema.ai applies machine learning models and analyzes it to give actionable insights that will help achieve profitable growth in real time.
With data becoming a black box, it’s increasingly difficult to get everyone on the same page to create a shared understanding of what drives profitability. Marketing teams are struggling to get user acquisition costs down, the finance team can’t forecast accurately enough, and the purchasing department is not making strategic decisions due to a lack of insights.
With Dema.ai’s no-code tool, insights that have previously only been available for bigger enterprises with vast resources will now be accessible to e-commerce companies of any size, democratizing this space. The goal is to positively impact how companies evaluate their marketing campaigns, customers, inventory, orders, and websites.
The new funding will help the young company accelerate its commercial expansion, product development, and recruitment of top engineering, data, and machine learning talents. Currently, the platform is available in Beta.
Luca Banderet, Partner at J12: “We believe that e-commerce will change rapidly over the coming years, and amongst other things put more focus on profitability and that the winners in that transition will have to operate with a data platform that offers deeper and more actionable insights than what is possible today. Marcus, David and Henrik have gathered a team with deep insights and networks in the industry and are arguably well positioned to build just that. They have great possibilities to build Dema.ai to become a global category leader in their target segment and beyond.”
