Exclusive: Retail AI startup Greendeck raises £500,000 from RLC Ventures, UK investors

Indore-based retail artificial intelligence (AI) startup Greendeck, which runs operations from London, has raised £500,000 (about Rs 4.2 crore) in seed funding from UK-based investors, led by early stage investing firm RLC Ventures.

"Online shopping has grown so rapidly over the past few years and caused high street closures but created its own challenges. Retailers and online brands struggle with dynamic and competitive prices. Greendeck helps them with price optimisation. It provides real value for retailers trying to sell their inventory in the digital space and position themselves perfectly in the online marketplace," Reece Chowdhry, founder of UK-based RLC Ventures, said.

The company, which also counts Techstars and SAP.io, the venture arm of SAP, as its existing investors, also saw participation from Force Over Mass Capital, Ascension Ventures, LMarks, and Startup Funding Club in the seed round. The company had raised around $120,000 (about Rs 85 lakh then) from SAP.io in September 2017.

"We will deploy these funds to double down on our sales, marketing, and customer success initiatives in Europe, especially in the UK," Aayush Jain, co-founder and chief executive officer, Greendeck, said. "We will also invest in scaling our AI products to serve the growing demand for easily consumable competitive insights," he added. 

Greendeck, which was founded in April 2017 by Jain, Aditya Joshi and Yashvardhan, took around eight to ten months to develop its proprietary AI platform. The company, which employs 20 people in India and the UK, released its product in 2018. It serves the US and Europe-based online retailers like Casper Mattress, Intu group, Spar Hervis, Showroomprive and Freshlabels. 

The AI platform assists in the pricing of products by delivering business insights to its customers, Jain said. He added that the insights are powered by the world's largest global retail product index that maps over 100 million unique products across 37,000 plus brands for more than 700 categories every day.

Jain also emphasised that with the retail market slowing down, optimising prices can prove to be a competitive edge. He added that the online fashion industry loses $400 billion a year due to bad pricing strategies.

Jain and chief technology officer Yashvardhan said the company will hire a team of engineers and sales representatives to boost growth and better the AI platform.

“The team will work on various aspects like visual product matching, automated product categorisation and tagging, and building an infrastructure that can support rapid growth,” Yashvardhan said. 

Jain said while two co-founders Aditya and Yashvardhan sit out of London, along with a sales team, he and the engineering team is in India.

He also added that the UK entity had now become the parent body of the organisation.