Skolkovo Ventures and BPI France Invest in“Brandquad” Startup to Increase International Presence and Open an R&D Center
Brandquad, a SaaS-systems developer for content analysis in e-commerce, has drawn €2.5 million from Skolkovo Ventures and BPI France. The funding will be used for exponential growth and entry into new industries, active sales expansion in Russia, Europe, the UAE, and the US, creating an R&D center in France, and bringing products to the global data synchronization network (GDSN).
The funding was in the form of a convertible loan and a subsidized loan. Brandquad is an alumnus of the Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF), Lafayette Plug & Play, and a Skolkovo (VEB.RF) resident.
Image: Brandquad
The main part of the funding – 62% – will develop sales and marketing of PIM directories and content analytics systems for e-commerce data intelligence in all markets. Among other things, this company will expand its partnership with Russian and foreign trading platforms. In Europe, the company already works with data belonging to the 100 largest retailers. In Russia, it has technologies for quick and accurate digital data on products for all trading platforms, and with the biggest of them – X5 Group, Magnit, and Ozon – it built an automatic system for seamless product content transfer.
The remaining funding will be directed towards developing Brandquad products. For this, the company will open an R&D center in Lille, France, where they will borrow experience and practice from leading European developers of digital solutions to adjust their products to the demands of global companies. For example, Brandquad is already developing machine learning-based technology, which will recognize the properties of goods through photos and enrich product cards in companies’ PIM-directories. Another development direction is the creation of technologies for preparing data for the market through Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Also, Brandquad synchronizes its products with the GDSN data transmission system, which uses retailers and suppliers worldwide. As a result, it allows the company to simplify and quicken its clients’ (global companies) work significantly with product data.
Alexander Chaikin, the executive partner at the Skolkovo Ventures IT Foundation: “Improving the buyer’s experience is a fundamental driver of development in online trade. In our view, Brandquad answers to one of the most important components in this process – the optimal supply of goods to virtual shelves in internet shops. We are glad to support a domestic company whose solution isn’t just successful, but is used by dozens of international producers and brands on the local market and are also gaining increasing global distribution in global markets.”
Philipp Denisov, CEO of Brandquad: “Our goal is to seamlessly integrate our high-tech platform into global ecosystems of data exchange between suppliers and trading platform. Automation allows you to speed up work with product content dozens of times and cut the costs of this activity for market participants by a minimum of a third. Therefore, the PIM and Brandsquad’s analytical system is in demand, not only in our country. Thus, Brandquad holding’s share of revenue in Europe in the last year has grown by 30% of the total volume, while the rate of revenue growth on the European market was twice as fast as in Russia.”
According to MarketsandMarkets data, the world market for Product Information Management systems amounted to $9 billion and should grow to $16 billion by 2025. In 3-5 years, Brandquad plans to occupy no less than 1% of the global market and increase its turnover to 100-150 million euros a year.
In 2018, the startup took part in an accelerator by the UAE’s largest retailer – Chalhoub Group in Dubai – and the Lafayette Plug and Play accelerator in France, 2019, receiving an award for the best startup. In 2019, the company opened two offices – one in Paris, one in Lille – to collaborate with global brand offices represented in Russia and Europe. In 2021, Brandquad was included in the Gartner list of technological solutions for e-commerce – The Gartner Digital Commerce Vendor Guide, 2021.
The company got its first pre-seed investments from the IIDF in 2016, having taken part in the tenth enrolment of the accelerator. After that, in 2017, the startup attracted 187 million rubles from a business angel and the IIDF, and in 2021 it received 2.5 million euros from Skolkovo Ventures and BPI France.