Intelligence Node

Intelligence Node is a real-time retail price intelligence platform that develops artificial intelligence and machine learning analytical products focused on price optimization. The company uses a SaaS-based delivery model and generates big data analytics for large and small retailers and brands. Intelligence Node was constituted in 2012 as a consulting firm and since then has evolved into the retail space as the provider of an analytics platform.

History
Intelligence Node was founded in 2012 as a retailer consulting company by Sanjeev Sularia and Yasen Dimitrov, and initially provided pricing and competitive intelligence advisory services in the e-commerce apparel domain. Sularia previously worked as the CFO for Exclusively.in (an e-commerce portal for upscale fashion), now acquired by Snapdeal, and CFO for Shersingh.com (a private label e-commerce fast fashion portal), now under Myntra. While Yasen was the Practice Leader at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in their London office. Prior to this, he was the Head of Research and Analytics in a boutique financial research lab in London. Intelligence Node began its operations with seven members at Mumbai, India. The company currently has offices in Dubai, London, and San Francisco along with Mumbai.

The enterprise expanded its consulting business into retail analytics and now provides real-time price information to the retailers by enabling them to gain plug & play access to AI-driven data which is collected globally. Retailers can use the products for pricing and competitive analysis where they can implement a dynamic pricing model based on accurate and reliable insights.

The technology engaged by the company encompasses SaaS-based (software as a service) platform that scans the internet for the pricing strategies and cataloging models of over 1 billion products of more than 130,000 brands sold in around 1,100 categories.

In 2015, Intelligence Node raised $4 million in Series A funding from New Enterprise Associates and Orios Venture Partners.

As a part of its global expansion strategy, Intelligence Node has integrated multilingual support into its applications. Currently, the platforms support 29 major languages, which represent around 95% of the total global GDP. It will enable the company to serve a global clientele and make its processes internationally scalable.

In February 2017, Intelligence Node announced the recent acquisition of three new global customers, namely UK's Made.com, Brazil's Mobly, and India's Tata CLiQ.

In 2019, Forrester Research included Intelligence Node in its Now Tech: Retail Pricing and Promotion and Now Tech: Retail Pricing Report.

In 2020, Intelligence Node announced year-over-year revenue growth is 100 percent, with its U.S. business representing a dramatic 297 percent increase in the last year.

Awards
In March 2020, it was announced that Intelligence Node won the Aegis Graham Bell Innovation in Data Science Award for its machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities for e-commerce pricing. While many dynamic pricing algorithms rely on historical pricing data only, Intelligence Node’s algorithm incorporates the key factor called “visibility,” which identifies how easily a product can be spotted on any search engine, which is critical in this Google-driven retail world.

In April 2020, Intelligence Node was honored to win the Compass Intelligence Retail Customer Experience award for the Emerging Tech sector.

Products
The main products of Intelligence Node are Incompetitor, a tool for competitor price assortment and benchmarking, and Inoptimizer, a rules-based optimization engine, which enables price optimization. The analytics take into consideration the pricing variances based on the geographical locations of the customers allowing merchants to streamline the pricing. Intelligence Node’s solutions also analyze the product turnover rate of the global fashion industry. Both these platforms work on a Software-as-a-Service(SaaS) model and offer a subscription-based licensing service to the users. They have recently launched fashion discovery app called Hook, the first artificial intelligence generated fashion feed for consumers. The Hook Fashion Discovery is free and available at the App Store and on Google Play.

Incompetitor is an analytical platform that collates and synthesizes big data around the globe to give customers in-depth knowledge about the competitors catalogue width and the pricing strategies and structures. It also provides a comparative view of the company’s own pricing alongside those of its competitors. The competitors include in-house brands as well as private labels. Incompetitor also displays the analytical comparisons on a product catalog basis presenting the range of products offered by the competitors.

Inoptimizer is a rules based pricing engine that eliminates the need for the retailers to affix a fixed price tag for their products and instead offers variable pricing based on the industry and market trends. The prices can increase or decrease depending on the competitors’ pricing, resulting in price optimization. It also enables smart inventory management using sales modeling and a recommendation engine to upsell and cross sell.