Estonia’s Data Depot tapping Asian markets

Tallinn-based customer analytics startup Data Depot is not the average B2B startup in our region –  it has tapped its first big clients in the United Kingdom and is now expanding its business in Asia.

“Doing pilots with fintech and insurtech companies in Asia, we see potential to connect startups, enrich their CRMs with freely available insights about their customers and provide cross-sell marketplace to find look-alike customers in different markets,” co-founder Akim Arhipov told ArcticStartup in an interview.

It is also seeing increasing demand for its fintech matching offer in Europe where “some of them have cheap & fast customer acquisition, but low margin and from another side high margin, but expensive CP.”

Data Depot’s customer analytics platform is suitable for a number of use cases, but when I ask Arhipov to describe it in just a few words he says: “It’s Tinder for fintech startups. I know what one thinks hearing this, but this is not your usual startup pitch – we are actually matching fintech startups with their peers and they can both benefit from the relationship.”

Data Depot is founded by the team which used to work on bus operator firm SuperBus.com in Estonia.

“We created dynamic pricing models analysing customers purchases frequency, wallet share, a number of orders, routes and lines they travel and the price they agree to spend on particular days, times and seasons in order to offer best suitable price for each individual,” Arhipov said.

The automatically collected information was not enough to predict consumers intentions though and they started to manually analyse the customers public social network behavior and interests and based on this information created media announcements, personalised newsletters and promotional code offers to customers dividing them to small segments by loyalty levels, demographic data, interests, level of income and spending patterns.

“That’ how we reached 1,000+ customers travelling with us each day (28 departures) after 3 months of operation in the country with 300,000 regular bus travellers,” Arhipov said.

Superbus left Estonian market, but the team understood they had learned how to create customer analytics business.

During past two years, the team has been involved in more than 50 different data analysis projects in many niches, where it has analysed the social behaviour of people around the world in order to identify interests, spending patterns, income level and psycho type characteristics.  

Explainer of Data Depot technology stack including non-obvious data analysis use case

The platform for fintech/insurtechs connects startups to leverage customer bases, co-operate and not compete (no operational costs for creating additional service/product), know more about their existing customers and attract similar ones using internal marketplace.

“We want to be trustworthy to brands and stand as a middleman in such growing competition for a customer,” Arhipov said.