Stockholm-headquartered next-generation marketing analytics platform Dema.ai nabs €4 million in a pre-seed funding round led by J12 Ventures and a group of high-profile angel investors including Jacob Hellqvist (ex-Epidemic Sound & Foodora CFO), Johan Bendz (ex-Zettle CMO & Juni Chairman), Erik Segerborg (ex-Avito deputy CEO & Hemnet CSO), and angel collective Framtid. The startup builds real-time analytics tools for small to medium-sized e-commerce and DTC brands. The funding will fuel up the product development pave the way for Dema.ai’s commercial expansion. Accordingly, the startup will be on the hunt for new talents in engineering, data, and machine learning.
The biggest challenge with e-commerce today is achieving profitable growth. The traditional way of operating e-commerce has a misleading top-line focus to improve high-level metrics around traffic and sales. In contrast, they should focus on getting the right customer and selling the right inventory to maximize operational profitability. This is more crucial than ever since the capital market does not have a big appetite for loss-making operators.
Over the last few years, significant changes in the digital advertisement space have resulted in worse online marketing efficiency with higher advertising costs, reduced profitability, and less transparency for companies dependent on 3rd party data. With data becoming a black box, it’s increasingly difficult to get everyone on the same page to create a shared understanding of what drives profitability. Marketing teams are struggling to get user acquisition costs down, the finance team can’t forecast accurately enough, and the purchasing department is not making strategic decisions due to a lack of insights.
Dema.ai has built a no-code tool that helps gather all first-party data from all commercial data sources, cleans and enriches it using AI-based predictions and presents actionable insights from the data in real-time. This means that insights that historically only have been available for the top 1% of e-commerces with massive data science and engineering departments will now be available for e-commerces of any size. This will significantly impact how companies evaluate their marketing campaigns, customers, inventory, orders, and websites.
“We created Dema.ai because we had seen the struggles firsthand when building my previous company that grew from 0 to over 120 million EUR in GMV. Many e-commerce companies today are looking at the wrong metrics, and It’s more important than ever to get in control of your profitable customer cohorts, inventory, and cash-flow in real time. This is the future of driving an online business, and we want to make Dema.ai universally accessible to all e-commerce” says Marcus Tagesson, co-founder at Dema.ai.
“We believe that e-commerce will change rapidly over the coming years, and amongst other things put more focus on profitability and that the winners in that transition will have to operate with a data platform that offers deeper and more actionable insights than what is possible today. Marcus, David and Henrik have gathered a team with deep insights and networks in the industry and are arguably well positioned to build just that. They have great possibilities to build Dema.ai to become a global category leader in their target segment and beyond.” says Luca Banderet, Partner at J12.
The new funding will help the company accelerate its commercial expansion, product development, and recruitment of top engineering, data, and machine learning talents. Before founding Dema.ai, Marcus Tagesson was the co-founder and CEO of The Babyshop Group, where he helped grow the company from 0 to 120 million EUR. Together in the founding team are two ex Babyshop Group department leads, David Feldell most recently from Ridestore and Henrik Hoffman from Growth Hackers.
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