Washington-based Datasembly aims to take the guesswork out of the pricing for consumer goods.
The company founded by Ben Reich and Dan Gallagher initially started as a project the two men developed after working at a retail analytics firm in the DC area.
What they observed while trying to collect information on pricing for goods and services for large consumer brands and national retailers was that there were so many things in the data collection that were flat out wrong, according to Reich.
“Companies are making multi-million dollar decisions on data that is incomplete… They’re trying to track the competition and understand their own place in the market,” said Reich. But without the proper tools, they just can’t, he said.
The problem becomes even more acute as retailers move to address consumers’ shifting tastes with regional, local, and hyperlocal specificity, Reich said. Datasembly boasts that its software can provide real-time data on availability and pricing to its customers anywhere in the country.
Datasembly solves the problem by scraping data on a massive scale, Reich said. The company, which went through the 500 Startups accelerator and had previously raised a small seed round had just closed on a $10.3 million series A round led by Craft Ventures with participation from Valor Siren Ventures.
The company counts three of the nation’s largest consumer packaged goods brands and two of the top five regional and national retailers among its customers already, according to a statement.
With the new money, Datasembly plans to expand its sales and marketing and product development efforts. As a result of the round, David Sacks, the founding COO of PayPal, founder of the messaging service Yammer, and co-founder fo Craft Ventures, will take a seat on the Datasembly board.
“For the last 20 years, retail industry data sets have remained largely unchanged. Now, Datasembly is leveraging technology to transform what companies can see, share, and do in a way that wasn’t practical or even possible before,” said Sacks, co-founder and general partner of Craft Ventures, in a statement. “Ben and the Datasembly team are changing the industry’s expectations of what’s possible when it comes to competitive pricing information. I can’t imagine a retail or CPG brand that wouldn’t want to take advantage of this data.”