SoundCommerce raises $15 million for big data insights that help retailers compete with Amazon

SoundCommerce, a platform that unifies retailers’ data from across multiple systems, has raised $15 million in a series A round of funding led by Emergence Capital.

Founded out of Seattle in 2018, SoundCommerce is pitched as an end-to-end data platform that helps retailers improve their marketing and operations by harnessing all their data from customers, sales and purchase orders, shipments, and inventory. It does this by plugging into third-party platforms, including Google Cloud, Snowflake, AWS, Azure, Tableau, Looker, Microsoft Power BI, and more through prebuilt integrations.

Ultimately, SoundCommerce wants to give retailers of all sizes the kind of data intelligence available to the major ecommerce players — such as Amazon.

“For brands and retailers to compete with Amazon and emerging digital-first competitors, it requires cutting-edge data capability and the discipline to apply data to key operations and marketing decisions,” SoundCommerce cofounder and CEO Eric Best told VentureBeat. “While SaaS tools like Shopify become ever easier to adopt and use, data fragmentation prevents consumer brands from unifying decisions across departments to optimize for profit, customer experience, and customer lifetime value (CLV).”

SoundCommerce had previously raised around $6.5 million. With its fresh cash infusion, which includes investments from Defy Partners and Voyager Capital, the company is well-financed to capitalize on the rapid shift to ecommerce that has been driven in large part by the pandemic.

Best also has a long and impressive track record in the ecommerce space, having sold a previous business called MindCorps to Amazon way back in 1999.

Data play

By combining all this data, SoundCommerce can glean granular insights around products, customers, or segments and categorize them by specific attributes, performance, or real-time status.

Above: SoundCommerce: Customer KPIs

Marketers may use SoundCommerce to track how a specific campaign is impacting the profitability of the product it’s promoting, including at the specific order and customer level. Retailer operators, meanwhile, might turn to SoundCommerce to monitor the impact of delays or cancellations on the profit and customer lifetime value — and how they should respond. This could mean that a company reevaluates its shipping policies and infrastructure or issues discounts directly to affected customers.

“The platform makes it easy to discern new and existing customers, and in turn optimize product assortment, merchandising discounts, inventory location, and shipment routing to maximize shopper engagement,” Best said.

At the heart of the SoundCommerce platform is a promise to make things as easy as possible by applying AI and machine learning to large swathes of data to help businesses make decisions that impact their bottom line — without having to throw their entire company budget at the problem.

“To do this today, companies either build an engineering team or you must hire a very expensive system integrator, which can take years and millions of dollars,” Best added.