NWO.ai is part of a profile series featuring startups participating in the Innovation Path at Cloud Wars Expo, taking place June 28-30 in San Francisco.
Who They Are
The founders of NWO.ai observed that consumer packaged goods and other industries encountered major blindspots during the Covid-19 pandemic: Rapidly shifting consumer sentiment made it difficult, if not impossible, to plan for demand.
That effect is still being felt today, more than two years after Covid-19 began, as many companies struggle to fulfill customer demand as well as understand and meet shifting preferences.
That lack of visibility led to the formation of NWO.ai, which develops an artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) platform that gathers and crunches vast quantities of data from publicly available sources, enabling customers to query that data for visibility into current and future customer trends.
“This is the reason we started the company during Covid,” says Miroslav Dimitrov, chief operating officer of NWO.ai, based in New York. “We saw massive, super volatile changes from one day to the next and we saw that traditional demand planning and market analysis methods didn’t cut it. They involve massive studies for 6 months, but by the time you implement, you have a year lag. As we saw during the pandemic, this doesn’t make any sense.”
The company says that since Covid-19, there’s a new economic world order driven by cultural narratives and online discourse. Its technology aims to help clients understand consumers’ fears, motivations, and demand drivers so they can get out in front of them.
“Traditional demand planning and market analysis methods didn’t cut it” during and post-Covid-191. “They involve massive studies for 6 months, but by the time you implement, you have a year lag. As we saw during the pandemic, this doesn’t make any sense.”
Miroslav Dimitrov, COO of NWO.ai
NWO.ai, by contrast, delivers reports (in response to user queries or pushed to users via notifications) in 60 seconds.
NWO.ai is part of the SAP.io startup accelerator program. It has $7.1 million in venture capital funding and 20 employees. Its customers include Fortune 500 CPG and pharmaceutical firms.
What They Do
NWO.ai’s platform ingests data from a wide variety of sources (Google searches via the company’s API, media sites, finance sites, and more) on a massive scale that captures more than 1 billion consumer voices in 65 languages, going back to 2006.
Without requiring any upfront customization, business analysts and other users can query the NWO system for trending insights on a product, product category, company, competitor, or other important items they need visibility into. If tracking a product category, they can also overlay the stock price of the top player in that field and correlate between stock performance and broader market indicators.
If there’s a sudden shift up or down in consumer sentiment, positive or negative, that can prompt a push notification to a user so that insight is available instantly.
Based on the data, the system can build forecasts of what’s to come in the next 3, 6, or 12 months, for example. It can also deliver snippets of news from a given day, compare adjacent product categories, and more. It can isolate where sentiment, or buzz, is strongest in the world — an important insight for global enterprises.
The company touts its fast ROI: Unless a user wants to integrate into, say, a data warehouse, there is no custom development or coding required; they can get up and running by querying the system. If a company opts for integration with a data warehouse, the time to launch is expected to be 2-3 weeks, Dimitrov said.
Customers will use insights derived from NWO in these types of use cases:
- Consumer Intelligence: Use data as a leading indicator of demand, forecasting trends.
- New Product Development: Gather and use consumer, market, and scientific data to build products that people love and that reflect consumer trends.
- Business Development, M & A: Take a deep dive into intellectual property and other developments to make more informed decisions on whether to build, buy, or partner.
- Market Intelligence: Identify themes before a significant uptrend or downtrend.
Who They’ve Impacted
Moonshot Brands buys Amazon and Shopify businesses. The company was looking for additional insights to make its due diligence process more robust. This was especially important in light of the fact that acquisition offers are sometimes created in as little as 48 hours.
NWO.ai’s technology provided visibility into the consumer narrative and demand drivers around categories, businesses, and products being evaluated. This enabled Moonshot to incorporate a 12-month forecast as part of its analyses.
NWO.ai enhanced Moonshot’s ability to make data-driven investment decisions. Jesus Otelo, CIO of Moonshot, said NWO.ai delivered:
- Knowledge of a product or brand’s popularity
- A consistent framework to evaluate a brand
- Insights that helped identify a new product category that led to an acquisition in that space
The Future and Final Thoughts
NWO.ai has positioned itself well by launching during Covid-19 to address a major business planning and visibility gap that the pandemic exposed. There’s been no letup in the pace of change (and innovation) since that time. So, it will be fascinating to see how broadly adopted the NWO.ai technology becomes, and if companies see it as a major weapon to develop the customer-centric insight they need to stay ahead of their competitors and win in an intensely competitive environment.
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