Olvin wins US$2mn seed round to bring behaviour analytics to the drinks trade
Olvin, an analytics platform for the drinks trade, has secured a $2 million (€1.7 million) seed round of investment. The round was led by Brainchild Ventures, a new venture capital fund, and Novator Partners chairman, Thor Bjorgolfsson.
The news comes as they announce the industry figures who will comprise their board of advisors. Bjorgolfsson takes a seat alongside Brent Hoberman of Founders Factory, Alexander de Carvalho of PUBLIC, and Guy Wollaert formerly of Coca Cola.
Olvin’s free-to-use platform analyses location, demographic and behavioural data to give drinks venues and brands a clear view of what’s happening in the real world. The company collects location data from mobile devices to identify patterns in where people visit and interprets their preferences.
Third-party datasets are anonymised and pseudonymised, and are collected in accordance with the EU’s GDPR rules. Where consent is required by the end user for any of the information processed, Olvin and its partners use industry standard methods of compliance.
This data drives the platform’s venue analytics and behaviour-led consumer insights. Businesses can then use these insights to create specific custom audiences that can be targeted through digital marketing platforms. The company is just the latest addition to Britain’s burgeoning tech scene, and harnesses innovations in big data and machine learning to help drive their analysis and revolutionise the drinks industry.
“We’ve seen how web analytics platforms can provide a tangible boost to digital-led businesses, but that’s not much help to an industry that exists almost entirely in the real world” said the company’s founder and CEO, Sam Amrani. “That’s why we created a product that would map out the physical world in the same way that products like Google Analytics have done with tremendous success in the online space.”
The company is looking to replicate the successes that industries such as retail, finance and manufacturing have had with machine learning. Their aim is to use big data to help the drinks trade win big.
Thor Bjorgolfsson
“The drinks trade is an incredibly fragmented industry, which is why Olvin’s behaviour-led data is so important for brands to connect directly to their consumers” said Amrani. “The platform also enables small businesses with modest marketing budgets to reach the audiences that matter most to them, without having to spend the earth”.
Olvin’s stated mission is to ‘bridge the divide between the offline and online worlds’. Helping them fulfil this mission are leading figures from the drinks and tech industries. Their board of advisors include Thor Bjorgolfsson, head of Novator Partners which specialise in supporting tech start-ups, as well as Brent Hoberman, co-founder of MADE.com and lastminute.com. Bringing expertise from the drinks industry is Guy Wollaert, formerly of Coca Cola, and Alexander de Carvalho, director at Heineken.
The platform is free to use, while customers can purchase custom audience segments starting from as little as UK£5.00.
Olvin works with a multitude of anonymised and pseudonymised third-party datasets which have been thoroughly and diligently collected and processed in accordance with the GDPR. Where consent is required by the end user for any of the information processed, Olvin and its partners use industry standard methods of compliance to ensure best practices are followed. The Olvin platform handles data end-to-end which means that users of the platform do not have to.
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