Big Brands Bet on New Predictive Analytics Platform From Reflektion

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 4, 2014) - Reflektion, an innovator in retail analytics, today announced that it raised $8 million in a Series B funding round led by Intel Capital and including NIKE, Inc. as well as several private investors. Reflektion provides a predictive analytics platform for retailers and brands through an easily deployable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. The company plans to use the funding to support its customers -- including Converse, Inc., which is currently piloting the technology, O'Neill, A.M. Leonard and RealTruck -- and to launch broadly its ecommerce and business intelligence solutions in the market. The resources will also be used for additional product development, plus expanded sales and marketing activities. 

Reflektion's platform detects trends and predicts in real-time what each customer is likely to buy next, enabling companies to drive significantly higher sales and customer engagement. Its cloud-based applications apply patented algorithms and technology that reduce computational overhead by hundreds of times. Its ecommerce solution enables immediate modeling at the individual level for real-time recommendations, visual site-search, responsive messaging, dynamic discounting and mobile optimization. As such, its ecommerce customers have achieved increases in sales conversion rates and customer acquisitions, especially with non-registered guests and anonymous visitors.

One of Reflektion's first customers, beach clothing retailer O'Neill, began working with Reflektion in July 2013. Installed in just a few days, O'Neill saw an immediate uptick in revenue per visit, conversion rate, average order size and page views compared to traffic not going through Reflektion's platform. By October, O'Neill's conversion rates through Reflektion sustained an increase of 50 percent, convincing O'Neill to deploy fully the Reflektion platform during the last holiday season.

"What we wanted was the ability to treat each online customer like an individual, as we do in our stores, but we were really limited in what we could do," said Daniel Neukomm, CEO of O'Neill. "With Reflektion, we are able to offer each visitor an individualized product assortment, and the sales results are dramatic. We gain greater insight into customers and product trends without a large capital expenditure or a large investment of time. We consider Reflektion strategic to our overall business."

Retailers and brands have a tremendous amount of data that they need to process and analyze. Reflektion's platform processes huge datasets and delivers a new type of business insight, using machine learning to discover and evaluate millions of attributes of customers, products and channels.

"This is like the game-changing 'Moneyball' story of advanced analytics being brought to retail. Reflektion offers sophisticated new technologies for retailers and brands to compete better -- and with little incremental investment," said Sean Moran, president and CEO of Reflektion. "We process large datasets in real time and apply patented machine-learning techniques to yield measurable results. We deploy our solutions from the cloud and work seamlessly with current ecommerce systems. Consistent, exciting, real-world results achieved by retailers and big brands quickly proved to our new strategic investors that Reflektion can be a game changer across the retail industry." 

Executive Team
Sean Moran serves as president and CEO of Reflektion. Prior to joining Reflektion, Sean was focused on growing Monsoon Commerce's ecommerce software and services revenues. Monsoon Commerce supports the multi-channel retail businesses of more than 20,000 online merchants with SaaS pricing and order management tools. He also worked closely on merchant programs with Amazon, eBay and Rakuten. Prior to Monsoon, Sean was the chief executive of the new-media division of Technicolor, with a leadership position in digital-media segments in a dozen countries. Sean was instrumental in developing PRN, an international, in-store marketing and merchandising platform focused on driving shopping behavior at the point of purchase. PRN worked with Walmart, BestBuy, Costco and other leading global retailers and consumer brands.

Amar Chokhawala is the founder of Reflektion and serves as its CTO. Amar began his career at Oracle in software development and was an early Google employee. His 11-year career at Google included key leadership roles in several successful businesses and platforms. He was an original member of the Adsense team, designing and developing core technologies that are critical to its widespread use today. Amar was also one of the founding engineers for Google Books, which is now part of Google Play. He did foundational work on Gmail user modeling, using semantic learning and other advanced technologies to improve search results and other applications for millions of users. Amar is an expert in distributed systems and large-scale computing.

About Intel Capital

Intel Capital, Intel's global investment and M&A organization, makes equity investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide. Intel Capital invests in a broad range of companies offering hardware, software, and services targeting enterprise, mobility, consumer Internet, digital media and semiconductor manufacturing. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than US$11 billion in over 1,339 companies in 55 countries. In that timeframe, 206 portfolio companies have gone public on various exchanges around the world and 344 were acquired or participated in a merger. In 2013, Intel Capital invested US$333 million in 146 investments with approximately 49 percent of funds invested outside North America. For more information on Intel Capital and its differentiated advantages, visit or follow @Intelcapital.

About Nike

NIKE, Inc., based near Beaverton, Oregon, is the world's leading designer, marketer and distributor of authentic athletic footwear, apparel, equipment and accessories for a wide variety of sports and fitness activities. Wholly-owned NIKE, Inc. subsidiaries include Converse Inc., which designs, markets and distributes athletic footwear, apparel and accessories; and Hurley International LLC, which designs, markets and distributes action sports and youth lifestyle footwear, apparel and accessories. For more information, visit www.nikeinc.com or follow @Nike.

About Reflektion

Reflektion provides a predictive analytics platform and easily deployable solutions for retailers and brands. Based in Silicon Valley, Reflektion was founded in 2012 by machine-learning superstars to bring the most advanced technologies into commerce businesses. Reflektion offers a quick and easy way for retailers and brands to achieve greater revenue, better conversion and more page views, without investing in new systems. Reflektion does the number crunching, deep learning and application delivery from the cloud on a subscription basis. Reflektion's patented algorithms reduce computational overhead by hundreds of times, enable modeling of millions of users every day and predict with high confidence what customers will do next. For more information visit www.reflektion.com.