French startup Akeneo just elevated a $thirteen million Sequence B spherical led by Partech Ventures, with present investor Alven Capital also taking part. Akeneo is a merchandise data management (PIM) services to handle all data about your solutions in your outlets, on-line and in your good-previous paper catalogs.
At heart Akeneo is an open up source PIM software — forty,000 men and women downloaded Akeneo so considerably. Everybody can seize it for absolutely free and implement it for their very own organization. You feed it info from Excel spreadsheets or your ERP, then you can handle and enrich this info in Akeneo. Ultimately, all this info remains accurate throughout all your interaction channels — your website, your outlets, your catalog or anything really.
This way, you can collaborate on the exact same catalog of solutions and reuse this data all over the place. In addition to the open up source backbone, Akeneo has developed an business version for quality customers. It has extra characteristics and support.
“Since 2014, we have worked with a little little bit additional than 120 customers around the globe,” co-founder and CEO Frédéric de Gombert instructed me. Clients include distribution teams like Auchan, Cora, Leclerc and Carrefour, clothes companies like Pimkie or Adidas, massive companies like Samsung and several additional.
In advance of Akeneo, several of people companies were being doing the job with massive IT giants like SAP to implement cumbersome catalog management program. Shifting to Akeneo is the equivalent of moving to a modern-day CRM, but for your solutions.
On regular, people 120 customers pay out around $37,600 per 12 months (€35,000). Most customers even now operate Akeneo on their very own servers, but the organization just launched a cloud-hosted version so you really don’t have to handle anything, not even the infrastructure.
And so considerably, nobody has looked back — it is fairly tricky to swap from one particular PIM remedy to a further, so Akeneo doesn’t have any churn difficulty. The organization now has 70 staff members — most of them are in Nantes, but the organization also has two very small offices in Germany and Boston.
“The PIM industry is like the CRM industry, but fifteen a long time powering. Just about every organization — it could be a brand name or a distributor — has two vital belongings: their customers and their solutions,” Frédéric de Gombert said. “Little by little, men and women are recognizing that you require to build a excellent merchandise practical experience if you want to build a excellent buyer practical experience. And it is true for everybody.”
According to Frédéric de Gombert, PIM products and services could turn out to be as massive as the most important CRM solutions. So let us see if Akeneo is building the Salesforce of solutions.
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