Meet Prediko, a new startup that sits at the intersection of e-commerce, fintech and software-as-a-service. If you’re manufacturing items or even just buying and reselling finished goods, chances are inventory management is one of the biggest pain points when it comes to running your business.
For instance, when you launch a new product, you don’t know if it’s going to be a popular item. You can either order too many goods or run out of stock too quickly. In the first scenario, it means that you are paying for goods that don’t generate revenue immediately, which will affect your cash balance for a while. You may also be spending money to store those items in a warehouse.
In the second scenario, you’re missing out on potential sales. It often takes quite a while to refill your inventory, so you want to forecast stock issues as early as possible.
Prediko has built an online dashboard that lets you review your inventory position as well as plan and order more products. Customers connect Prediko with their Shopify store directly — the startup is building integrations with other e-commerce platforms. After that, they can generate inventory reports to see fast-moving products, slow-selling items and the current retail value of the inventory.
The platform then helps you generate different growth scenarios depending on seasonality, ad campaigns and more. Over time, customers can compare actual sales with revenue targets. Like many SaaS products, Prediko competes with Excel spreadsheets and manual forecasting.
Finally, Prediko helps you create purchase orders for your suppliers. You can track orders from Prediko directly using a kanban view.
And there’s a fintech angle with these capital-intensive e-commerce businesses. Prediko will also help you finance your stock so that your purchase orders don’t affect your bank account too much. This is a smart move as Prediko already has a ton of data about their customers’ revenue performance.
Prediko has raised a $5 million in a seed round led by Felix Capital. Other investors include Guillaume Pousaz’s Zinal Growth, HelloWorld, NomadCapital and the CEOs and/or founders of Klarna, Gorgias, Zencargo, Pigment, Ankorstore and Yoobic.
With Prediko, online brands should never run out of stock by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch