Red Analytics
Founded in early 2015, Red Analytics (Trading as HIVERY) offers retail strategy simulation and optimisation to Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) customers around the globe.
Need
HIVERY began to scale up its sales team in North America and at one point had 10 projects running with various companies. To scale as quickly as the business was growing, it reached out to us for financial support.
Solution
We provided a A$1.3 million Export Contract Loan that provided the working capital to support HIVERY’s contracts, enabling the business to scale up the team to deliver its services in the US.
Headquartered in Surry Hills, NSW, HIVERY has sales offices in Japan and the US, and around 90% of its revenue is generated internationally.
HIVERY started as a $US50K experiment after a data hackathon event that proved AI can augment human thinking. This led to the creation of a mathematical model that optimises the products in fleets of vending machines.
It was the right product to suit the problem that we were facing, which was long working capital requirements. And getting some support from the federal government as we're a 100% export business, I think was kind of the right product for the right problem.
Roy Cooke
CFO, HIVERY
Since then, the concept has been evolved and utilised in different formats. “As a company, we have now refocused our thinking on: what does optimisation mean?” And it's about making sure that we help our customers optimise their retail shelf space,” HIVERY’s CFO, Roy Cooke, said.
“We started with vending machines and now deploy our technology for large store formats and are extending into smaller retail formats like gas stations and convenience stores. This is our main product. The other product is looking at price optimisation and is in development stage.”
As an emerging business, HIVERY had utilised several financing options following its initial seed funding from The Coca-Cola Company, and later rounds from Blackbird Ventures, AS1 Growth Partners and One Ventures.
After signing two major accounts following the success of working with Coca-Cola, HIVERY began to scale up its sales team in North America and at one point had 10 projects running with various companies. However, Roy highlighted that US Global CPG companies operate on extended payment cycles of 90-120 days.
The team knew that it would not be able to scale as quickly as the business was growing. This is why the business reached out to Export Finance Australia.
Supporting the US expansion
There is a significant upfront financial and time investment to fine-tune the requested AI model for delivery to the customer. This means, while invoices may be issued in July, payments sometimes won’t be made until November.
“That’s a big capital drain for a small company growing. And this is the reason that the Export Finance loan was perfect for us.”
We provided a A$1.3 million Export Contract Loan that provided the working capital to support HIVERY’s contracts, enabling the business to scale up the team to deliver its services in the US.