XSeed is very excited to announce our investment in FINDMINE, a software platform that automatically curates products and product groups for use across merchant’s ecommerce, digital marketing and in-store displays or applications. The company is bringing critical technology and new data sets to retailers, allowing them not only to apply common technical advancements across their omni-channel efforts, but simultaneously to create value for end consumers and the merchandisers and stylists that are bringing products to market.
We first met the founders, Michelle Bacharach and Costa Itscov, last summer. After hearing about their respective passions for pursuing this problem, we decided to invest for several key reasons:
1. Michelle and Costa are incredible entrepreneurs. As you can imagine, we meet a lot of founders, and many of them are very impressive. In this case, we have the privilege of working with two who have an authentic understanding of the pain points (consumer and technical) that exist in retail, and have a true thirst for gathering information until they get the solution right.
2. The retail industry (currently focusing on fashion) is a significantly large industry that is under a significant amount of pressure. Some of these challenges include pure ecommerce competition, inventory management complexities, operational overhead needed to coordinate brand guidelines, as well as messaging and promotion across channels. Despite these challenges, retail remains a massive industry and we love seeing companies apply technologies that create unique data assets and applications that can build value in this type of arena.
3. We were introduced to FINDMINE as they were bringing their first set of pilot customers online, and we heard loud and clear from those retailers how valuable this technology is. Each of those early customers is either now a long-term client or in the process of converting to one. It is wonderful to see FINDMINE deliver on their stated value proposition, and we believe that this is something that can rapidly scale across a significant number of new customers.
We aren’t the only ones that have noticed FINDMINE. The company was asked to showcase at the National Retail Federation show in New York last month, and the Washington Post recently featured a great piece on the company. FINDMINE plans to double their team this year and has several open NYC positions listed on XSeed’s Jobs page.
XSeed is happy to be joined by Kiwi Ventures in supporting Michelle, Costa and the FINDMINE team as they build their business! Follow FINDMINE on Twitter at @findmineUS.