SMART IRELAND
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L–R: Profitero co-founders Volodymyr Pigrukh,Kanstantsin Chernysh andDmitryVysotski
The company plans to develop
its service in two directions over the comingmonths. “Currently, we’re providing a price intelli- gence service for retailerswhere wemonitor prices of their com- petitors.We see a lot of interest from manufacturers for a simi- lar service. So we’ll be expand- ing potentially with a solution formanufacturers. “Secondly, we’re looking in
2012 to build the price optimisa- tion solution, which would help pricing managers to advise on the price range for their prod- ucts to maximise the sale. This is based on themarket situation – the data that we’re collecting right now – and also the trans- actional data from our clients. We will be able to put this to- gether and develop it using our in-house algorithms to come up
€750,000 in a funding round led by Bank of Ireland Start-up and Emerging Sectors Equity Fund,managed byDelta Partners and Enterprise Ireland. “Winning the Seedcamp competition gave us networking and
introductions tomajor investors inEurope and in theUS andwe are working very hard to keep this momentum going. It doesn’t seemto slowdown,which is a good thing. Since September 2010, we’ve been pushing this forward to go faster and faster.”
FUTURE PLANS Looking to the future,Profitero has plans to expand both the busi- ness and the product offering. “Right now,most of our customers are based in theUK,” saysPigrukh. “We are expanding inEurope aswell.We have a fewpaid customers in
continentalEurope.And we are looking to expand in the US very shortly –maybe within the next sixmonths. This is on the business expansion. “As well, we have a very strong development team based in
Minsk.Andwe are pushing our product forward.We are doing a lot of innovation around the presentation of the
data.Aswell,we are collecting very large amounts of data which allows us to de- velop better pricing for our clients.” According toPigrukh, there are competitor products available
but “we proved already that our solution ismuch better”. “It’smuchmore scalable and the quality of data is
higher.There
are some solutions which are based on old technologies and I think we were lucky enough to come to the market at the right timewith the right set of technology,which helped us tomove for- ward very fast.”
with the best price tomaximise their sale in the currentmarket situation.” Pigrukh agrees that the company’s technology has awide num-
ber of potential applications. “But for us retail andmanufacturing is a hugemarket, sowe need to concentrate. As a small teamwe need to have laser sharp focus onwhatwe’re
developing.The bet- ter focuswe have, the better vertical solutionswe can develop for our
clients.And thenwe can deliver better value for them.” Profitero has 13 full-time employees, including three in Ireland
and nine inMinsk, as well as a business development person in London. “We are planning to expand both sides, primarily when we get more customers we’ll need to develop to have account managers and telesales based in Ireland.We’ll definitely be look- ing to hiremore people in Ireland.” At themoment,most of the company’s client contracts are on
a pilot basis. “They’re paid clients, butwe’re notmaximising rev- enue on them,” saysPigrukh. “To startwork in these large retail- ers such as Tescowe need to prove to themfirst that our data is valuable and accurate. For the moment, turnover is small. The first part is developing the product and testing it, having pilots with clients, and the next part,whichwe’re starting now, is to do the business development and
sales.This iswhenwe’re looking to increase our revenues. “We can say that in the middle of 2012 we are planning to be-
come
profitable.And probably after thatwe’ll be raising another round of funding to accelerate the growth.”
This article first appeared in IrishDirectormagazineSpring 2012 Issue 4 Spring/Summer 2012 INNOVATION IRELAND REVIEW 37
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