Venzee (500 Startups) (CIX Winner)

As a supplier or manufacturer, you sell your product through retailers and wholesalers and you need to provide them with the information they need to sell your product.

For decades, the default method of delivering product information from the manufacturer to the retailer has been the spreadsheet.

In today’s world, your retailers sell online. They use lots of different e-commerce solutions and sell your product through many different channels.

Good for you. Not so good for them.

Retailers have to spend lots of time working on your spreadsheets so they can sell your product.

A retailer who is making your spreadsheets compatible with their systems is taking time away from the business of selling your products.

Really big retailers often insist that you do this work for them, which takes you away from the business of making your products.

Meet Venzee.

Venzee leverages the power of the cloud so you can provide your retailers with the product information and the tools they need, to sell more of your product.

And by connecting your ERP or warehouse management system to Venzee, you can wave goodbye to costly, inefficient spreadsheets.

Venzee. No more spreadsheets.

So how does Venzee work? A manufacturer, for example, imports their product information to Venzee. Our only required field is a record ID which they identify. Then, they share this product information via our platform with the companies that sell their products.

Our transformation feature lets these companies create dynamic versions of the manufacturer’s product information that is error free, content rich and compatible – whether it’s destined for a store on Shopify, an auction on Ebay or an update for Walmart.

Our founder and CEO has worked in e-commerce and supply chain management for more than 15 years. She has built and sold two e-commerce businesses and has experienced, first hand, the pain of taking a manufacturer’s spreadsheet and turning it into products available for online purchase. A process that can take up to a month.

With Venzee, this can take a couple of hours and the best part is that when done, this product information is dynamic and stored on our servers. As the manufacturer updates information like inventory or cost or discontinues a product, the retailers versions are updated too.

And by connecting a store, app or marketing channel to Venzee, everywhere the retailer sell’s the manufacturer’s product, is automatically updated.

Our cloud-based SaaS platform can transform massive amounts of data into any format required. This means that manufacturers and retailers can meet the compatibility demands of channel distribution and communicate in real-time with the rest of their supply chain.  

We save them big on money, time, and human error…what could be better than that?  Which is why some of North America’s largest brands are interested in Venzee’s ability to turn their spreadsheet problem into real-time integration.

There’s no longer a need to pay people or try to outsource the process of robotically building and distributing spreadsheets. It’s labor intensive, expensive, delays products and updates reaching shoppers and its a process that does not scale.

Without sounding too techy, here are some of our key features:

The latest in cloud-based technology.  Our platform is best in class, comprised of an API layer, Angular.js front-end, and a Node.js back-end. We’re hosted on AWS and RackSpace and can scale instantly to accommodate a global customer base.

Benefits for the entire supply chain.  Venzee benefits both manufacturers and retailers. Connecting a supply chain where the gaps in system compatibility are bridged by inefficient and costly spreadsheets.   This is especially crucial for our larger, international clients.

Data the way big retail needs it.  Big retail puts the burden of making product information compatible with their systems, on the manufacturer. Manufacturers use Venzee to transform their own product information, making it big retail ready in minutes.

Real time notifications.  Venzee tells you what changed and when. No more searching through spreadsheets on an FTP server trying to figure out what the manufacturer updated.

Web ready images.  Our users turn the hundreds of huge, high resolution images from their manufacturers into web ready images with one click. Resized, optimized and delivered in minutes.

Minimum Advertising Price capabilities.  Our patent pending MAP feature helps manufacturers insure pricing compliance. Protecting their brand and insuring a level playing field for retailers.

Venzee is B2B, SaaS which means scalable, recurring revenue in addition to professional services.

The best thing about the Venzee sale’s model is its network effect. By closing a single deal with a manufacturer, they bring hundreds of retailers to our platform. Retailers that do business with other manufacturers.. who do business with other retailers and so on and so on.

We worked closely with Patrick Campbell at PriceIntelligently. Patrick is a leader in SaaS pricing strategy. Venzee has a freemium plan that allows manufacturers to share product information with their retailers who can access and export this information, as is, free. 

As soon as our users decide to eliminate spreadsheets by connecting their store, marketing channel, ERP or app, they pay. As soon as they transform the information they have access to, making it compatible, they pay. MAP monitoring is another paid feature.

Our pricing model seamlessly evolves with the needs of our customers and they like it.

2015 has been a huge year for Venzee! 

Here are some of the high points;

• Graduated 500 Startups and were approached by 40+ VC’s and angels
• Won a year of free office space for up to 20 people 
• Chosen by CIX as one of their top twenty tech companies for 2015
• Raised $1.5M in seed funding
• Attracted investment from institutional investors as well as angels
• One of the largest food and beverage companies in the world were amongst our first paying customers

This raise will be used for;

• Growth marketing
• Feature development
• Tradeshow attendance

There is an extremely strong liklihood that this will be the last time that Venzee raises funds before a significant Series A.

Venzee has proven leadership with previous exits and domain experience. The team includes 8 full-stack developers that have substanial experience with big data and API development.  

CEO: Kate Hiscox
Kate is a seasoned e-commerce entrepreneur, having started 6 companies and exiting 4 of them successfully. She first experienced the problem that Venzee solves with her first startup in 2004. Upon discovering that the problem still existed 10 years later and was only getting worse – Venzee was born.  

CTO: Marco Sylvestre
Marco is a certified Scrum Master with a track record that includes training and transitioning three companies, including a billion dollar insurance and financial services company from waterfall to agile within 24 months.

Director of Customer Success: Melvin Bunag
Melvin is an accomplished and results-driven Customer Success Professional focused on retention through meaningful customer engagement. Over 15 years in the Customer Support industry including Ebay.

Director of Marketing: Mark Bakker
Mark is best in breed when it comes to growth marketing in B2B. Skills include inbound and outbound marketing, SEO, conversion and site optimization, SaaS business and analytics and customer retention.

Board of Advisors

Clay Loveless and Gary Ruebens sit on Venzee’s Board of Advisors.  Mr. Loveless co-founded Mashery (acquired by Intel for $180 million), a company that implements and manages APIs for some of North America’s largest retailers.  Mr. Ruebens founded ATG Stores (acquired by Lowe’s) and is a valuable source of leads into both of our target SMB and enterprise channels.