Observa, a Seattle-based startup that uses AI to provide analytics on brick-and-mortar sales, has closed a $725,000 financing round.
The company creates real-time, crowd-sourced retail audits that show brands and retailers how products are being displayed in physical stores and correlating that with sales.
The funding comes from some well-known investors, including longtime entrepreneur Paul Mikesell, a co-founder of Isilon Systems, which was acquired by EMC for $2.25 billion; Bill Bryant, a general partner at Threshold Ventures whose involvement with startups include Remitly, Chef, Qpass and Visio; and angel investor Drew Bradley. Mikesell is also currently involved with a secretive Seattle startup called Maka Autonomous Robots (Maka-ARS).
Revenue for 5-year-old Observa grew four-fold last year. Its customers report an average sales increase of 23% after using the platform. The business has 20 employees.
“Observa offers brands and retailers a source-of-truth information solution that heretofore simply hasn’t been available,” Bryant said in statement. “Prior to Observa, brands have had had no way to measure the real-time sales impact of the $70 billion spent in in-store promotion and merchandising.”
Observa was featured in GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight after winning first place at the Bend Venure Conference in October. The company has raised more than $2 million.
Observa chief technology officer and co-founder Erik Chelstad is a former GeekWire Working Geek. Chelstad worked as an engineer for Mikesell in the early days of Isilon.