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SMART IRELAND
THOUGH STILL SOMEWHAT SHY OF ITS SECOND BIRTHDAY, DÚN LAOGHAIRE-BASED PROFITERO, WHICH PROVIDES A COMPETITOR PRICING DATA SERVICE TO RETAIL- ERS AND MANUFACTURERS, is some- thing of a prodigy in the Irish start-up world and is currently racking up the achievements and accolades. Highlights over the last couple of years
have included raising €750,000 in its first round of funding, signing up high-profile clients likeNielsen andTescoDirect on a pilot basis, and winning several Irish and global start-up competitions, including, most no- tably, the Global Entrepreneur of the Year 2012 title at the IBM SmartCamp Global Fi- nals in California in January. Before winning the global IBM competi-
‘It is very easy to set up a company here in Dublin andwe received a lot of support from Enterprise Ireland and other government agencies’
tion, the company had won the UK and Ire- land leg in London last November. At that time, IBMsaid it hadwon due to “outstanding technology, innovative business plan and alignment with IBM’s Smarter Planet Tech- nology”.When Profitero won the global prize, the IT giant de- scribed it as “a great example of the kind of start-up company that IBMis partneringwith around theworld to build a smarter planet.We look forward to working with Profitero to combine big data expertise with retail insights and entrepreneurial in- novation to create new smarter commerce solutions for retail- ers”. While the company was honoured to win the competition,
Profitero’s CEO Volodymyr Pigrukh, says the business implica- tions of the win are far more important than the actual acco- lade. “This is a great opportunity for Profitero to partner with IBMandwe’ve found a lot of synergies between our solution and Profitero’s ‘SmarterCommerce’ initiative,” he explains. “We see this more as a business development than a competition itself. “We’re definitely looking to collaborate with IBM and inte-
grate our solution into IBMproducts, andwe’ve actually started this already.We did a small integrationwith one of the products. “And of course it’s good to have IBMon our side. For a small
company like Profitero, going to pitch to large retailers is usually very hard. Having IBM on our side helps to position us as the leader in the market, a reliable supplier of the service, and a company that develops technology very fast.” At themoment, that technologymonitors 28million products
across 3,000 retail websites and the figures are growing daily. Retailers use the company’s software to monitor online prices, stock availability, shipping costs and benchmark prices against their competitors. As a start-up, Profitero is interesting on a number of different
36 INNOVATION IRELAND REVIEW Issue 4 Spring/Summer 2012
levels, not least because the three co-founders –who includeDmitryVysotski, the company’s chief technical officer, and Kanstantsin Chernysh, VP of engineering, as well as Pigrukh – are originally fromBelarus. The idea for the business came from
Chernysh, who is based in the Belarus capi- tal Minsk and used to own several online stores, including in the UK and the US. He had problems with pricing his products be- cause he didn’t knowhis competitors’ prices, so he developed a prototype solution to trawl rivalwebsites, collect the pricing information and deliver this back to him.Hewas then able to benchmark his own pricing against that of his competitors. “Kanstantsin showed the solution to
Dmitry and he showed it to me and we saw the potential for the service to other retail- ers,” explains Pigrukh. “Sowewent out there and had extensive conversations with our friends in retail, asking if this solution would be useful.We received very positive feedback and then decided to start the company and
establish such a service.”
IRISH BASE At the time of setting the company up inSeptember 2010,Pigrukh and Vysotski were already based in Ireland. “I’ve lived in Dublin for 10 years and Dmitry has been here for around five years.We came towork for large ITmultinational companies here inDublin. I didmymaster’s in international business here and then Iworked atMicrosoft, Accenture and Googlemost recently. Dmitry came towork for IBM.” However, they did have the choice in the early stages tomove to
the UK, says Pigrukh. “But we still decided to stay, mostly be- cause it is very easy to set up a company here inDublin andwe re- ceived a lot of support from Enterprise Ireland and other government agencies. I think thesewere themain factorswhywe stayed and set up the company in Ireland.” Early on, the company received a grant to test its solutions in
themarket. Very shortly after officially setting up, the company was one of the European Seedcampwinners in September 2010. It was subsequently a finalist of DublinWeb Summit 2010 and won the Irish Innovation Cubed award last year, which provided the company with a year’s free office space in IADT’s campus- based digitalmedia incubation centre. “Even todaywe are based in the same location inMediaCube,”
saysPigrukh. “We have to pay for the office nowbut it’s a good lo- cation and that iswhywe stay here.” Last November, around the same time it won the IBMSmart- Camp finals in London, the company revealed that it had raised
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