Machine learning platform for retailers Remi.ai closes seed round

Machine learning platform for retailers Remi.ai closes seed round

The Remi.ai Sydney team (provided).

Sydney-based Remi.ai has completed a $1.44 million seed round, with investors including Artesian, InterValley, Superseed, Sydney Angels, Frazis Capital and Clearsign backing the machine learning platform which supports retail and e-commerce supply chains.

The seed round follows the startup’s first foray into accepting external capital, completed in June 2021 after Remi.ai received the backing of Boab AI - an accelerator run by Artesian Capital that is dedicated to financing AI projects.

The company, which counts Coca-Cola and Microsoft as clients, intends to use the capital on making new hires, building out its research and development (R&D) capacity, and pushing sales and marketing efforts.

“As an early-stage startup we really do two things: we try to build out our product and sell it. But we’ve got some key bottlenecks that we need to remove on the product side,” Remi.ai co-founder Eamonn Barrett tells Business News Australia.

“We’ve got a few key hires that will help us to speed up our onboarding implementation process and we’ve got plans to increase our R&D capacity as well as our design and front-end engineering team.”

Founded in 2014 by Barrett, Alasdair Hamilton, Calum Hamilton and Shahrad Jamshidi, Remi.ai is a platform that delivers demand forecasting, inventory management, replenishment and price optimisation to retail and e-commerce clients.

As explained by Barrett, a former medical scientist, the company’s thesis is the intelligent automation of supply chains.

“The way that we deliver on that thesis is we are forever researching and applying the latest AI machine learning optimisation tools to supply chain challenges, and offering that to retailers and manufacturers via our platform,” Barrett said.

While the company started by giving out advice to clients as a consultant, it has since been able to realise recurring revenue through its newer Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform which the startup claims are equally as accessible to Fortune 100 companies as it is to SMEs.

Once set up, clients have access to forecasts and alerts generated by the Remi.ai algorithm, detailing a variety of helpful prompts like whether a product is expected to be in high demand, and when retailers should consider replenishing certain stock based on pricing, shipping, and other such data points.

As such, Barrett says Remi.ai has proven invaluable to many clients during the chaos of the supply chain crisis, noting that “no algorithm or technology will be able to solve the problem of having no staff”.

“From right back at the start two years ago, we were helping customers to model what it looks like when all of their stores might have to close, for example,” Barrett said.

“So we were pulling in data strings from all over the place, from COVID case data in each region to government mandates around border closures and things like that and we were starting to feed that into our forecasting models and build some assumptions.

“Now, later on in the pandemic as things have evolved, we’re doing a lot more work on things like container optimisation - shipping costs have skyrocketed over the last year or so, so we’ve been helping customers in that space too.”

With demand only increasing for intelligent solutions like Remi.ai, and with this seed round closed, Barrett hopes 2022 will be major for the company.

“Once we have some more boots on the ground we will certainly be accelerating big time,” Barrett said.

“We’ve got some big plans for 2022.”

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