Crisp Convinces More Investors That It Will Erase Empty Grocery Store Shelves From Every Store Shelves
Crisp convinces more investors that it will erase empty grocery store shelves from every store shelves
When it comes to the global pandemic, which is already in its second year, the picture of food store shelves that are bare or mostly empty has reappeared after first appearing in early 2020. As for us, the end consumers, consider how it must feel for those in the grocery store supply chain who are losing money and dealing with dissatisfied customers.
Founded in 2016, Crisp has built an open-data platform for each link in the supply chain, allowing for better insights, demand estimates, and other data to be gathered that can be used to enable those involved in the supply chain make more informed inventory decisions.
Until recently, food brands, merchants, and distributors all kept their own, separate records of their inventory, periodically communicating this information with one another via an incomprehensible spreadsheet.
At the best of times, the lack of communication and transparency made it difficult to have a comprehensive sense of the supply/demand ratio for any given product, resulting in (real) tons of food wastage and trillions of dollars being spent. Aiming to help retailers, distributors, and manufacturers better understand demand estimates for a variety of commodities, Crisp launched in January 2020.
Later, a pandemic struck, causing the pendulum to swing sharply in the opposite direction. Not only was the industry's data infrastructure lacking, but customer behavior was changing at a rapid pace, and the supply chain was in complete disarray as well.
Crisp took advantage of the chaos by securing additional money and extending its demand forecasting program as a result of the financial crisis.
Crisp intends to address this issue by offering these suppliers and distributors with immediate and real-time visibility into their data sets. A wide range of ERP software has been integrated by the company, which infuses historical data from food brands and combines it with a variety of other signals related to demand drivers such as seasonality, holidays, price sensitivity, previous marketing campaigns, changes in the competitive landscape, and weather that may affect the sale or shipment of ingredients or the finished product.
On Tuesday, Crisp said that it has closed a $35 million Series B financing (at a valuation of "just under $500 million") and gave the TechCrunch blog an update about its transition away from application-based computing and toward platform-based computing.
Despite the fact that the technology is crucial for all links in the supply chain, Are Traasdahl, the creator and serial entrepreneur, stated that forcing these personnel to adopt yet another application/dashboard was likely an impediment to the company's success. Instead, Crisp has provided an API that interfaces with retailers', distributors', and brands' existing workflows to give the same real-time and forecast supply information as the company's website.
The API-driven technologies, which are used in areas such as finance and telecommunications, are provided by Plaid and Twilio, according to Traasdahl. "Our goal is to establish ourselves as a technological platform that enables the use of a modern API on top of legacy systems that are utilized by retailers, distributors, and other supply chain partners to increase efficiency. The last time we spoke, we were somewhere in the middle between platform and application development, but today we are completely focused on platform development."
Crisp's greatest strength is that it gets better as it grows in popularity. Despite the fact that a single yogurt brand can benefit considerably from understanding its own supply/demand scenario, when there are hundreds of brands in the system, Crisp's predictive model can be even more granular in its predictions.
Crisp has experienced substantial growth in the preceding year, with over 200 emerging and business brands (including Greenleaf, Nature's Way, and Ripple) now available on the marketplace (see chart below). Its retail and distribution operation in the United States spans around 80% of the grocery retail sector, both online and offline, according to the company. Crisp has also acquired some significantly larger clients, growing from companies with a market capitalization of less than $500 million to ones with a market capitalization of more than $70 billion.
Despite the fact that Crisp's customers are mostly brands and manufacturers, Traasdahl claims that he also provides valuable services to retailers.
Previously, Traasdahl explained, "they assumed they could push a button today and have the product tomorrow." COVID has changed that belief. "But because of out-of-stock situations and people entering the store and being unable to locate the product, this is a huge source of concern for their bottom-line profit margin. They've discovered that they can partner with a company like Crisp to increase data interchange, which benefits brands and distributors tremendously and enables them to be more proactive in their marketing efforts and operations."
Indeed, as compared to shops who do not participate in the Crisp program, supermarkets who join in the initiative have seen a 300 percent increase in "service levels" (meaning that when they click on a button to order a product, it actually arrives).
The increased funding will be utilized to increase the size of the team, which now has approximately 80 members of staff. In terms of gender, women account for 33% of the team, persons of color account for 15% of the team, and women account for half the management team.
This Series B fundraising was headed by 3L, with participation from existing investors FirstMark (who led the seed round) and Spring Capital (who led the Series A financing) as well as new investors.
