Fresh from his time at Y Combinator, SaaS startup Anakin raised $ 2 million to further develop its software that enables e-commerce companies to view their competitors’ live pricing data.
Mohit Prateek and Rashmi Bala founded the company last September and officially launched in March to help e-commerce stores and brands increase their sales using price, product and trend data from other companies. While the company’s nickname is actually the name of a “Star Wars” character, CEO Prateek said they picked it for fame rather than passion for the films.
Even before the company was founded, the co-founders worked at the interface between artificial intelligence and e-commerce at companies such as Flipkart and Truefit.
Prateek in particular happened to be trying to solve the price problem on Flipkart with a large team that was optimizing SKUs across regions and channels. He later left to build other startups but continued to receive requests from ecommerce companies for help with pricing. As the number of calls increased, he asked Bala, with whom he was already working, if she wanted to start a business.
“We had customers before we even started building the business,” Prateek told TechCrunch. “However, we didn’t have a product to sell, I only advised them on how to set it up.”
Here’s how the technology works: Company A is pricing an item, such as a tomato, and everyone else is required to price their tomatoes in a similar way to entice buyers into buying them instead of Company A.
Rather than trying to guess the best price, Anakin automates the management and pricing of millions of competitor SKUs using data like inventory to provide those insights in real time so retailers can increase their sales by up to 12 on average. can increase%.
Anakin started out in the grocery business and has now expanded to include grocery deliveries, ridesharing, and travel. While unable to disclose customers, Prateek said the company works with some of the largest companies in these fields.
In fact, the company was profitable even before the seed round. It didn’t need to increase the round, but Anakin was lean only as a pair and wanted to grow quickly in multiple sectors and regions, he added.
The company, with presence in San Francisco, Singapore and India, secured new capital from Y Combinator, HOF Capital, Austen Allred, ACE & Company, Integrity, Pioneer Fund and a group of angel investors.
To date, Anakin is growing its sales by 24% every month and is active in more than 10 countries, Prateek said. The funds will be used to hire additional employees in order to have more boots on site in other countries. The company will also invest in product development, expand into other categories, and develop a self-service tool.
“We started in the middle of COVID and were afraid it would close us, but even mom and pop stores are online and competing with Amazon,” he added.
