Tysons tech startup Datasembly, which gives grocers and other retailers real-time product pricing data, has raised millions in new funding to hire aggressively and get its analytics platform to more customers in a period of pandemic-fueled demand.
The local company has closed a $7 million round led by existing investor Valor Siren Ventures, part of Chicago’s Valor Equity Partners, alongside others including San Francisco’s Craft Ventures; New Haven, Connecticut-based LaunchCapital; and Evan Brown of Toronto financial services firm BMO Capital Markets, Datasembly said Wednesday. Richard Tait, partner at Valor, and Lee Insinga, Datasembly’s chief operating officer, are also joining the board.
The business plans to invest the new capital in its sales and marketing strategy, which involves doubling down on recruitment for engineering, sales and marketing positions, co-founder and CEO Ben Reich said in an email.
The company, which has 77 employees, is already putting the fresh financing to work, with a handful of positions open including software engineer, recruiter, product manager, data engineer and software development engineer. And that’s just the start.
“We have grown the team aggressively over the last 2 years and will be passing 100 full-time employees in 2022,” Reich said.
The income statement reflects the growth: The startup roughly doubled annual revenue from 2019 to 2020, Reich said. “The current forecast for 2021 continues to support the doubling of the business again,” he said, declining to disclose specifics. But, he said, that growth comes largely from adding new enterprise customers and expanding revenue within its existing accounts.
The company, which is headquartered at 1775 Tysons Blvd. in Tysons, said it’s not looking to expand its footprint at this time.
Datasembly sells a data-as-a-service model, with pricing and promotion information, to grocery and other businesses — both brick-and-mortar retailers and online shops — to ultimately improve their bottom lines.
The company counts three of the top 10 consumer packaged goods brands — makers of products such as bagged chips or frozen meals — and three of the top five regional and national retailers among its customers, though it declined to disclose names. Datasembly’s artificial intelligence-based data collection engine gathers billions of pricing and product records each day from more than 130,000 stores across the country. That enables those brands and retailers to adjust their pricing strategies based on current market activity, while creating a new layer of transparency, according to the company.
Now, the startup is expanding beyond just the U.S. in North America “at the request of many of our existing customers as well as current prospects," Reich said.
The Covid-19 crisis increased competition in the grocery industry, forcing stores to “turn on a dime,” by changing their aisle setups to accommodate double the amount of toilet paper or Lysol, Reich said. The wide consumer shift to in-store pickup and at-home delivery “was dramatically propelled during the pandemic, and that’s driving massive investment in e-commerce across the marketplace,” Reich said. And because e-commerce has grown exponentially during the pandemic, “this has created a rich demand for the solution we are bringing to market,” he said.
Reich and co-founder Dan Gallagher launched Datasembly in 2014, after working together at Arlington’s Applied Predictive Technologies. Together, they went through Halcyon’s first incubator cohort in their venture’s inaugural year. Reich declined to disclose the company's lifetime funding, but data firm PitchBook pins it at $19.3 million, following $10.3 million in Series A funding in August 2020 and $1.9 million in seed capital in July 2018.
