Bornlogic, the startup that turns the seller into a marketer

Bornlogic wants to decentralize marketing campaigns by using in-store salespeople to create campaigns for major retailers.

Backing this view, Astella Investimentos has just led a BRL 52 million round in the startup. Astella had already invested in Bornlogic in 2020 in a seed round.

Bornlogic was born nine years ago from the head of André Fonseca, a computer engineer who worked on the team that invented the JAVA language, at some startups in Silicon Valley and more recently at Vinci Partners.

The startup started with a slightly different model than the one it operates today: it created robots and machine learning algorithms that helped its clients better distribute advertising dollars in digital marketing campaigns. Basically, the algorithm saw which campaigns were doing better (and worse), and automatically reallocated the budget.

Four years ago, André was talking to one of his clients, Magazine Luiza, when he had the idea that made the startup pivot its business model.

“We saw that, instead of putting robots, retailers could put their salespeople to do digital marketing campaigns,” André told the Brazil Journal. “They have a great know-how of the people, the products sold and are able to make authentic and more creative content. When we tested it, we saw that they even gave our algorithms a bath.”

In practice, Bornlogic offers a platform that delivers a system for distributing funds between the various stores and vendors, as well as a governance system — an essential part of ensuring that the videos produced do not create a risk to the company’s image.

In addition, the startup delivers an application where the seller can come up with ideas for their videos with tips coming from the company’s own headquarters or the industry, and with tips generated by Bornlogic’s own machine learning system.

“With 300,000 different videos already aired, we were able to gain visibility — at the level of SKUs, segments and brands — of the evolution of customer behavior. See what sells the most, what sells the least, the communication that works best and the communication that works less,” said André. “With that, we distribute these ideas to sellers with our Seller Assistant, which is our machine learning algorithm.”

The result of this is that Bornlogic is able to decentralize digital communication from retailers – who are able to run thousands of different campaigns per month – and with superior engagement results.

Carrefour, for example, managed to go from an engagement rate of 2.7% in its campaigns to 27% using Bornlogic’s software, according to André.

“When we invested in Bornlogic, our vision was that retail was going to be digitalized a lot in the pandemic and that their platform was attacking this issue in their veins. The guy who did this promotion in front of the store, with a sound car, pamphlet, would have to do it another way,” said Marcelo Sato, from Astella. “Since then, a lot of what we had designed has come to fruition, and Bornlogic has tripled in size.”

The startup already serves 65 retailers from different branches. From department chains like Magazine Luiza and Via Varejo to supermarkets like Carrefour and Pão de Açúcar, passing through fashion platforms like Renner and C&A.

Customers pay a monthly subscription to access the software in addition to a take rate on top of sales generated by campaigns created at Bornlogic.

To make sure that a physical store sale was due to one of its campaigns, the startup created an attribution system that connects to the retailer’s ERP.

For example, if she campaigns for Lacta chocolate for a store and three hours later sales of that chocolate start to boom, she can attribute part of those sales to the campaign.

Bornlogic will use the funds from the round to increase the computational density of its software and boost the commercial area, focusing on segments other than retail.

André’s plan is to sell the solution to large industries and even education and financial services companies. “It’s a solution that helps any company that has a B2C sales force,” said the founder.

Series A had the participation of Hi Partners, a fund focused only on retail techs; from Endeavor Scale Up and Marcelo Lombardo, the founder of Omie.

Source: Neofeed