Main Highlights
- Stonehenge Technology Labs announced a $2 million initial investment in their Stopwatch commerce improvement software.
- Stopwatch collects over 100 million rows of data per workspace each day, analyzes the data points, adds real-time warnings, and delivers the appropriate info to the right people at the right time.
- AI-assisted employees facilitate cross-channel, collaborative execution amongst human SMEs, allowing choices that used to take days or even weeks to be completed in minutes.
- Stopwatch is designed to integrate with a simple “drag” and “drop”.
Stonehenge Technology Labs urges consumer packaged goods businesses to make effective use of the data they collect. It announced a $2 million initial investment in their Stopwatch commerce improvement software.
Bread and Butter Ventures, Gaingels, Angeles Investors, Bonfire Ventures, and Red Tail Venture Capital also participated in the round, which was headed by Irish Angels. CEO Meagan Kinmonth Bowman launched the Arkansas-based firm in 2019 after working at Hallmark, where she was in charge of the company’s digital transformation.
“This was not due to them not being excellent marketers or being connected to mom,” she explained, “but they did not have the technology to connect their back end with stores like Amazon, Walmart, or Hobby Lobby.” There are a lot of brilliant people developing things to interact with customers. The problem is that the big boys are doing things the same way and not thinking like the 13-year-olds on social media who are winning the sector, she noted.
How was Stopwatch formulated?
Kinmonth Bowman and her team noticed a gap in the intermediate layer that connected the worlds of dotcom and brick and mortar. She believes that if the middle layer is applied to corporate resource planning and integrates public and private data streams, a firm may be just as lucrative online as it is in conventional retail. Stopwatch, Stonehenge’s response, collects over 100 million rows of data per workspace each day, analyzes the data points, adds real-time warnings, and delivers the appropriate info to the right people at the right time.
Stopwatch collects both public and private data around the clock, allowing marketers and supply chain leaders to approve Stopwatch ML-driven actions several times per day, every day. AI-assisted employees facilitate cross-channel, collaborative execution amongst human SMEs, allowing choices that used to take days or even weeks to be completed in minutes using Stopwatch.
How does it work?
The Omni-Commerce emphasis meets the particular demands of the online team while remaining fully customizable to optimize brick and store insights. The retailer-agnostic solution controls operations in real-time across all retailer locations. Trusted data and straightforward reporting can be quickly piped to your preferred database, emailed to your mailbox, or exported from the app.
Alerting and directed actions execute on your command, delivering instant business outcomes and replacing your analyst’s maintenance labor, and a modular framework allows for easy integration of third-party data sources to supplement in-house tech settings.
While you’ve probably heard of “open source” software and been taught to request “an API connection,” Stopwatch is designed to integrate with a simple “drag” and “drop.” Their engineering staff enjoys collaborating with your engineering team and the engineering teams of your partners.
According to Dan Rossignol, a B2B SaaS investor, the CPG industry is also about consumerizing our lives, and the worldwide pandemic demonstrated that individuals may have a busy day and business even at home. Rossignol enjoys investing in underappreciated entrepreneurs and recognized Stonehenge as a firm that is extracting CPGs from beneath outdated technology.
“What Meagan and her colleagues are doing is fascinating,” he continued. “At this point, it’s all about the individuals and the willingness to take a risk on something bigger.” Kinmonth Bowman stated she had the option of locating the firm in Silicon Valley, but selected Bentonville, Arkansas instead to be closer to the more than 1,000 CPG companies headquartered there, which she considered to be the ideal client base.
The platform was originally developed as a subsidiary of a consulting firm, but in 2018, one of their clients stated that they only needed the software and did not want to pay for the consultation. Stonehenge went underground for 8 months to create a software product exclusively for the customer when the firm was divided.
Kinmonth Bowman acknowledges that the technology itself isn’t all that exciting – it involves extracting data from hundreds of systems into a “lake house,” siloing it by retailer and other criteria and then displaying the data in various ways. The CEO, for example, will have different metrics than product teams.
Over the last year, the company’s income has more than quadrupled, as has the number of contracts. It already has many Fortune 100 businesses and rising brands as early adopters, and it intends to utilize the extra money to establish a sales team and pursue some strategic connections.
Stonehenge also works to build a varied staff that imitates software consumers, said Kinmonth Bowman. One of the obstacles to go towards Arkansas was to obtain unique talent but she stated she was keen to embrace it. Meanwhile, the Stonehenge team “is insane, clever and determined” to develop something extraordinary, said Brett Brohl, managing partner at Bread and Butter Ventures.
“There have been all the largest corporations for many years, but not a lot of major companies have done a decent job digitizing their company,” he stated. Even pre-COVID, digital changes were underway, but COVID has expedited technology and slammed many businesses against one another. That was made clearer for customers to end, which puts greater pressure on firms to grasp the need that is beneficial for Stopwatch. The following cloud change went from paper to Excel table sheets. The correct moment for the next step and the way data are used.
