A quick chat with Ido Ramati, co-founder and CEO of Revuze

Steven Loeb · August 31, 2016 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/4707

Revuze, an AI-powered brand management platform, has raised a $4M seed funding round

In the world of business, companies have huge volumes of unstructured feedback pouring in via call centers, emails, surveys, charts, online comments, blogs and social media. That makes it extremely difficult to gleam any actionable insights. 

That's the problem that Revuze is looking to solve. It uses artificial intelligence-powered technology that enables brands to better understand product, brand management and customer satisfaction issues. all while streamlining the Product Experience Management and automatically scoring and ranking a brand’s performance, both relative to its competitors and to the market as a whole.

On Wednesday, the company announced a $4 million seed-funding round led by Nielsen, The NPD Group, and TIC Group.

Founded in 2013, the Netanya, Israel-based company, which also operates in Australia, will use the new funding to expanding its U.S. operations by opening offices in San Francisco and New York City, where it plans to 10 additional employees by the end of next year. That would be on top of the 20 employees the company has right now.

I spoke to Ido Ramati, co-founder and CEO of Revuze, about the company and how it uses artificial intelligence to solve an age old problem.

VatorNews: What is the problem that Revuze is trying to solve? How does it solve it?

Ido Ramati: Revuze takes any amount of unstructured data. It could be from any industry, from fast food to automobiles to hotels. The first step, and this is where the artificial intelligence, neural networks and machine learning engines come in, is Revuze does not rely on the traditional method of hiring teams of data scientists, product and BI experts. Typically, they would manually predefine, construct and maintain rules, dictionaries and taxonomies before interpreting the findings, which results​ ​in a process ​that ​is very slow, expensive, inefficient and can lead to misinterpretation.

Revuze removes these limitations, directly addressing the biases and other shortcomings of those managing such extreme volumes of data, by automating the entire process and letting the system teach itself what and how to analyze the data. For example, instead of having an analyst predefine keywords and dictionaries that they think are important to measure, the Revuze platform generates and independently maintains a list of metrics to measure, based on the discussion topics it identified in the data. 

​​The entire data from any of the sources is delivered, via an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard, which presents all data sources in a single screen, rather than on seven or eight different screen or user interfaces with different solutions for different sources.  Moreover, Revuze allows its clients to benchmark any feature, functionality or experience of their products and brands to the industry benchmark, or to other competitive products or brands.

VN: Who is the typical customer for Revuze? Walk me through a typical use case

IR: Revuze caters to consumer brands of manufacturing companies, such as CPGs, consumer electronics and toys, and to service-oriented companies, such as fast-food chains, hospitality and banks. Revuze users are from fairly varied sections of an organization, such as marketing, R&D/product development, operations, BI and customer service.

Marketing teams, for example, are using our solution to replace their existing methods for tracking their brand health, to measure product launch success, to conduct a competitive analysis including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis, and to understand the consumer buying criteria. R&D teams are using the solution to understand which product features are working properly and which features are getting too many complaints, and to understand which product metrics are important to their consumers.  

VN: How many customers do you currently have? How are you growing?

IR: We have six customers. Strategic partners such as Nielsen and The NPD Group are introducing Revuze to their clients, who often end up working closely with us.

VN: Why is what Revuze does valuable to its customers? Have you calculated any ROI?

IR: Revuze provides its customer an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard that replaces the need of using six to eight different solutions operated by teams of data scientists, product experts and analysts. We enable our clients to get immediate actionable insights from any source on three difference levels: Industry, or measuring the industry benchmark on every aspect; brand, which means comparing your brand performance to competing brands; and product, which involves analyzing down to a specific product SKU.

VN: Where would you like to see the company in the next five years?

IR: Our strategy is to continue our expansion both inside and outside the U.S. market, including adoption in different geographies by as many industries as possible. In addition, in the next five years we will continue to develop our groundbreaking technology which revolutionizes the text analytics space in a way that caters to other domains beyond the market research domain.

VN: Is there anything else I should know about the company?

IR: We are happy to see that the Fortune 500 companies we are working with, which have already lost faith in using text analytics because of their complexity and the vast resources they require, are regaining their trust via Revuze. Now, they have a better way to create better products and services and to interact with their clients. 

We believe that in the same quick way the market research domain embraced our technology, other domains with different use cases will do the same.

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