A cloud and mobile solution for the consumer goods industry is to launch a US headquarters after raising £16 million in Series A funding.
Aforza, headquartered in Frimley, Surrey, aims to empower businesses of all sizes to sell more and grow faster.
It plans on leveraging the funding, led by DN Capital with further participation from Bonfire Ventures, Daher Capital, and Next47, to double its employee headcount over the next six months and establish new US headquarters in the Northeast.
Aforza claims that companies using outdated platforms lost at least 5% of sales due to the lack of in-store availability last year while 70% of money invested into trade promotion programs was unprofitable.
In the face of constantly changing regulations and fluctuations, consumer goods companies need to be able to scale and respond quickly, and Aforza says its agile AI predictions are helping customers worldwide drive sales and retain customers.
“Aforza is on a mission to help consumer packaged goods companies get ahead of competition with our cloud and mobile solutions designed specifically for their industry – so they don’t have to cobble together outdated, generic legacy tools,” said CEO and co-founder Dominic Dinardo.
“CPG companies around the world are facing challenges like never before, and with Aforza, they can accelerate their growth regardless of what may come next.”
Aforza’s suite of cloud-based and mobile applications provides real-time insights to help CPG companies digitally transform their route to market. It connects commercial planning and field sales teams together to solve the problems of unprofitable promotions, declining market share and lack of revenue growth.
Business users can quickly launch targeted promotional campaigns in hours versus days without the need for any technical support.
“Building on top of two world-leading cloud platforms, Salesforce and Google Cloud, Aforza is transforming the consumer goods industry in the same way Veeva and Vlocity transformed the pharma, telco and energy sectors,” said Thomas Rubens, partner at DN Capital.
“Aforza is the only cloud platform that seamlessly connects trade planning to field execution in real-time with the most intuitive user experience.
“This improves the return on trade promotions to a level competing legacy solutions just cannot match.”
Aforza is easy to install and use immediately without significant training or technical experience – it says even an eight-year-old can use it. The solution also operates offline and on-device without internet access, giving sales users the flexibility to do business on their own terms in any location.
“Addressing a need ignored by traditional cloud solutions, Aforza’s modern cloud and AI technology is digitising the consumer goods industry like never before,” said Bonfire Ventures partner Brett Queener.
“Aforza is that secret weapon behind the smartest companies in an industry that supports an estimated 20m American employees – more than 10% of US jobs – and uniquely empowers them to adapt to changes in real-time and build emotional connections with their end customers.”