CQuotient, With $3M from Bain

Founder and CEO Rama Ramakrishnan is a veteran of analytics as applied to business and retail. He was formerly chief scientist and vice president of technology and development for ProfitLogic, a price-optimization software company that Oracle acquired in 2005. Joining Ramakrishnan at CQuotient is chief operating officer Graeme Grant, who was most recently the CEO of Allurent, the nevertheless-defunct online shopping firm. Grant and Ramakrishnan earlier worked at the same time at ProfitLogic.

CQuotient just started in July, so the company isn't giving too many specifics about its innovation or business strategy. What's interesting is that it's riding some big trends in consumer tech, just as personalized shopping and recommendations, more targeted and mobile advertising, and increasing amounts of data on specifically which items people buy, and when and where they buy them. A company that can help retail stores make sense of all those details—and translate them into selling more stuff—stands to do pretty then.

But, our experience means that we have as well seen the limits to the approach ProfitLogic and other firms have taken. By focusing on customer-level data from day one at CQuotient, we are opening up a whole new set of value for retailers. And by leveraging new developments in cloud computing, we are able to process the huge quantities of data required to really unlock this value.

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