AI-powered platform Monocle announced today that it is emerging from stealth mode to help consumer brands easily deploy and personalize promotions to turn spending into profit. A $7.5 million seed round led by F2 Venture Capital supports the platform’s launch. And this funding round includes investments from Tiferes Ventures and irrvrntVC and founders at Instacart, Everlane, Melio, and Chubbies.
Setting up promotions is a manual and challenging process. Large consumer tech platforms generally have the resources and know-how to automate the process with causal-based AI methods. With Monocle’s innovative technology, DTC companies of all sizes can use AI to build incentive strategies that reach consumers on an individual and personalized level.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent yearly on promotions, which are under-personalized and under-optimized. This is because most DTC companies depend on time-consuming A/B tests to inform incentive decisions, leading to strategies lacking user-level targeting and quickly becoming outdated as consumer patterns change. Monocle delivers the technology to go beyond A/B testing to deploy smart and personalized incentives based on the incremental effect to maximize profit.
Monocle opened its platform to select brands last year and is now used by Death Wish Coffee, BRUNT Workwear, Honeylove, and others. Headed by a team of industry veterans from Lyft, Instacart, and Stripe, Monocle was co-founded by Noam Szpiro and Mark Lotman.
Monocle provides quick integration capabilities, and the platform can be used within days without internal engineering or data science teams needing to help with onboarding. And the technology easily connects to a brand’s store and email/SMS platforms (such as Klaviyo and Attentive), providing performance insights alongside a granular analysis of promotions indicators impacting the brand’s performance like online revenue, budget spent on promotions to date, average incentives given to customers, customer lifetime value, etc.
KEY QUOTES:
“Throughout our years at big consumer technology companies, we saw the power of causal based AI models that provide incentive strategies. We know the single best lever for consumer conversions is the final price they pay, and we’re thrilled to launch our platform that provides brands with the right tools to unlock the power of smart incentives that drive incremental profit – no matter their size.”
- Noam Szpiro, Co-Founder and CEO of Monocle
“Monocle has been an absolute game changer in helping us personalize our incentive strategy without increasing complexity or manual execution. Since our partnership began, we’ve seen a night and day difference in our abandonment flows. Monocle has given us an entirely new understanding of our business as it relates to our incentive strategy, and we’re excited to witness the continued impact their technology has on our business.”
- Lyndsey Adamo, Associate Director of Retention at Honeylove
“Promotions spend is a massively under optimized field, with many consumer brands leaving money on the table as they rely on outdated incentive structures. We invested in Monocle because we saw firsthand how advanced their technology is compared to others in the market. The technology, coupled with the team’s vastly relevant experience, uniquely primes Monocle to bring real rigor into the space for brands.”
- Maor Fridman, General Partner at F2 Venture Capital
