Capillary Technologies To Strengthen Its New Product Development By AI, ML
Initially incubated at IIT Kharagpur, Capillary began its operations in Bangalore in August 2008. Co-founders of Capillary Technologies, Aneesh Reddy, Ajay Modani, and Krishna Mehra, wanted to address the biggest challenges that the consumer brands were facing at the time – to capture customer data, the inability to identify consumers visiting their stores, and the need to communicate effectively with them.
As consumers expect a connected and seamless experience, Capillary has developed products that help brands get a 360° single view of customer and inventory across all channels. So brands can stitch together previously siloed customer journeys with data, and build unified, cross-channel strategies that deliver consistent, omnichannel experiences. Over 300 marquee brands across 30+ countries, including Pizza Hut, VF Brands, Walmart, Al-Futtaim, KFC, Starbucks, Madura Garments, Courts and Samsung, trust Capillary. With over 300 million consumers and 25,000 stores on the platform, Capillary is Asia’s leading SaaS product company.
Having raised approximately $20 million from its existing investors, including Warburg Pincus and Sequoia Capital, the company expects to strengthen its new product development, powered by AI and ML, to cater to Asia and other emerging markets. To further strengthen its presence in China and the Middle East, besides penetrating further into Southeast Asia, the company will soon be opening its second office in Guangzhou and Beijing in 2018. Going beyond retail, Capillary is also expanding into FMCG soon.
Changing technology trends in the consumer goods segment
Consumer goods traditionally used to be a B2B market where the manufacturers/brands used to go through multiple tiers such as dealers/distributors/wholesalers/retailers to reach their end consumers. However, this is changing with advancements in technology, where companies are trying to reach directly to their customers. This is being done through a shift to online channels. Brands are establishing such channels themselves or taking advantage of marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart, Bigbasket, etc.
Going online and direct to retail, enables brands to get a real sense of what is happening in the marketplace. They’re now able to understand consumer preferences, the impact of their promotions and any other environmental triggers that affect a brand’s performance.
Most consumer goods companies are starting to view digital as a key channel to reach to their target consumers, especially the millennial.
In India and other similar emerging markets, more than 80% of the sales of FMCG companies is through General Trade (GT – Kirana Stores).Today, innovators are leveraging technology such as deep learning and big data analytics to increase and optimize channel engagement. This substantially increases their interaction with channel partners such as distributors, wholesalers and retailers.
Role of Capillary Technologies in the consumer good segment
Capillary has launched Direct-to-Retail (D2R), a ready-to-deploy platform and an app that enables brands to reach retailers directly through their distributors by enabling digital transformation of distribution channels covering orders, promotions, recommendations and loyalty points.
Brands can expand their retail footprint with anytime ordering functionality for their distribution channel partners, especially those that are remotely located. They can ensure distribution partners carry their complete assortment by empowering their field sales with automated and personalized product recommendations on their SFA (Sales Force App). Capillary is also investing in cutting edge video analytics technology to optimize the shelf space and product placement and marketing compliance of the general trade retailers and give the brands real time critical and actionable insights on their channel performance.
Way Forward
Capillary is helping retailers with access to deep insights about consumers which allows them to hyper-personalize the entire shopping experience on a one-one level. These products will help brands to send out the “right message” including product recommendations etc. to the “right customer” at the “right time” and through the “right channel”. This omnichannel approach offers a personalised, connected and seamless shopping experience for consumers. Products such as Capillary VisitorMetrix and InStore AI providing offline stores with the sort of data and insights that were previously exclusive to the online domain. Right from footfall or store traffic data to store heat maps, offline clickstream, visitor demographic insights and behavioural insights capabilities at offline stores would be on par with online commerce.
