Ashburn, Va.-based shopping app Solebrity is looking to supplement its consumer-facing business with a shift towards B2B data analytics.
Since its launch in 2013, the startup has been known as a consumer-facing social shopping app. But the launch of its new Solebrity Analytics arm and its acquisition of Ashburn, Va.-based data analytics company NetDataDirect.com all on Dec. 1 signals a turn for the company towards enterprise technologies.
Solebrity's app is pretty simple: Share your favorite products with your followers, and earn cash, Solebrity badges, VIP treatments and other rewards whenever one of your followers buys a product you endorse. Because of that, Solebrity has collected quite a bit of information on its main demographic: millennials.
Solebrity CEO and co-founder AJ Jaghori believes in the power of the company's data. He likens his startup to a cross between social shopping site Ebates, which offers coupons and deals for various fashion brands for a price, and some of the world's most powerful artificial intelligence technology.
"If Ebates were to incubate with IBM Watson, you would have Solebrity," says Solebrity CEO and founder AJ Jaghori.
Eventually Jaghori said he started to get interest from other companies who wanted to use the data Solebrity was collecting on millennial shoppers. Jaghori said that interest was seen specifically by executives at McDonald's.
That's when he met the co-founders of NetDataDirect, and they started talking about how the two companies could work together. NetDataDirect built a Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform from the simple goal of creating a web scraping platform. Jaghori said from the acquisition, Solebrity Analytics gets a client base and NetDataDirect gets to use Solebrity's artificial intelligence technology.
"We have the AI that can help make their platform smarter and faster and more agile to deliver to existing customers," Jaghori said. "We have the technology that can deliver faster and provide more cost-effective solutions. There's tremendous value for both."
NetDataDirect's two co-founders have been brought on as principals for Solebrity Analytics, and 20 of the company employees from its three different offices, but not all of its employees, have also moved over to Solebrity Analytics. The deal closed for an undisclosed amount.
Fred Small, former president and CEO of NetDataDirect and now principal at Solebrity Analytics, said the two companies just had a clear synergy.
"It made a lot of sense that we join forces instead of them going through the three-year build-up that we had already gone through," Small told DC Inno.
And he's excited to see how their company's technology evolves in Solebrity's new platform.
"We’re looking forward to working with Solebrity’s engineering team because we believe that with their artifical intelligence-driven technology and ours, we can bring a change in the data field and data gathering," Small said.
Image used via CC BY 2.0 — credit Jason Howie
