AI-driven SaaS startup Kuona raises $6m round to solve brand pricing and promotion challenges

AI-driven SaaS startup Kuona raises $6m round to solve brand pricing and promotion challenges

Published: 20-12-2022 10:07:00 | By: Pie Kamau | hits: 3441 | Tags:

Kuona, the intelligent SaaS platform that uses machine learning to automatically optimize product prices, promotions, and inventories for consumer packaged goods (CPGs) and retailers, announced it has raised a $6 million seed round led by COMETA, with participation from Seaya Cathay Latam and FEMSA Ventures. The new capital will be used to expand Kuona's presence and team in key geographies, including Latin AmericaEurope and the United States.

Based in Monterrey, Mexico, Kuona was founded by Chema Sanroman and Agustín Magaña, who combine decades of experience in data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and CPG revenue and pricing management. Launched in 2017, the company set out to help the competitive CPG and retail industries better adapt to the ever-changing consumer market dynamics by leveraging data-driven tools to predict demand and track customer behavior.

Chema Sanroman, CEO and Co-founder, Kuona: "Our product is truly global in nature and also has versatile omnichannel capabilities, effectively serving modern trade (supermarkets, convenience stores), traditional trade (mom and pop stores), and major e-commerce organizations. While consumer markets vary greatly, we can adapt to the data available in each country. Kuona's unique proposition of automatic data capture with high levels of granularity and accuracy has proved its value to customers, many of whom previously relied on Excel and paper-and-pencil era techniques to try and predict demand - an approach that generated low-quality predictions."

Today, most CPG companies run thousands of promotions per month, spending millions of dollars, and eighty percent of these activities do not turn a profit. Kuona helps CPG and retailers dramatically increase the ROI of their promotions while maintaining or increasing their sales. By integrating with its clients to capture real-time data and leveraging neural networks for simulations with a high precision level (up to 97%), Kuona is providing a much more effective and cost-efficient solution. After opening its latest office in Brazil, the company is already profitable and operates in five countries while serving major customers around the globe, such as Coca-Cola and OXXO convenience stores.

Federico Gómez Romero, Principal, Seaya Cathay Latam: "Accelerating digitization means revenue managers have an increasing amount of data to inform their decisions. However, without the right tools, information remains fragmented and leveraging it is exceedingly difficult. Kuona's unique product, purpose-built for the CPG and retail industries, offers a fully automatic process from data integration to the final recommendation. In Kuona we've found an exceptional team building an innovative technology and business model that will have a lasting, positive impact well beyond the Latin American market. We look forward to working with them to leverage our corporate ecosystem to expand globally."

www.kuona.ai