On May 24th serial entrepreneur Ben Davies will be taking part in the latest Tech Barometer event in Manchester.
He’s arguably the most successful tech founder you haven’t heard of, but his business Vypr is a household name with retailers including Iceland, Co-op, KFC, Leon and Ella’s Kitchen.
The company has raised more than £9m in investment from private equity and angel investors and has grown to 55 staff.
Vypr’s game-changing technology can better identify consumer purchase intent – which can help customers avoid costly and unsuccessful product launches.
“It’s like Tinder for products,” is how Davies describes Vypr before his appearance at this month’s Tech Barometer event.
“Vypr has can become a global player in our sector. The vision and ambition is very high. There’s no such thing as an overnight success so to reach 10 years is a proud achievement.
The platform has a community of 70,000 reviewers who sit behind it and enable businesses to rapidly understand changing consumer behaviour through fast, cost-effective consumer insight.
“The idea is we help companies get their products right before they hit the shelves,” he said.
Vypr’s platform combines research into behavioural science with a segmented consumer panel, allowing the client to test every aspect of product innovation, from packaging, pricing and naming to product claims.
Davies says the insight is quicker and more valuable than traditional New Product Data (NPD) market analysis and can be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful product launch.
The entrepreneur will be joined at the Tech Barometer event on May 24th by Charlotte Ashton, founder of Implicit; and Jack Donohue, CEO and founder of Fairmont Recruitment.
The popular quarterly event is organised by tech specialist Fairmont Recruitment and BusinessCloud and discusses the changing trends in tech, recruitment and investment.
Davies has more experience than most having launched his fifth and most successful business – Vypr – in 2013.
He began his career in the food and drink industry as a buyer for Sainsbury’s, buying various chilled food categories, before moving to a similar role at the Co-op.
From there, he began his entrepreneurial journey and has founded a series of business across technology and the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sectors.
A decade ago he set up Vypr to drive better outcomes in the product innovation process through predictive consumer insight, combining his experience in the FMCG sector with his love of technology.
Since then the business has gone on to become the world’s leading product intelligence platform.
Davies said: “Our platform combines expert support with the latest research technologies to power faster and more precise product decision-making.
“We can count some of the biggest names in the consumer goods sector as clients and Vypr helps them to make better decisions to get winning products to market faster. It’s an exciting time and I genuinely believe we’re on the way to making Vypr a global name.”
Last year the company launched a new tool called VyPops allowing brands to gain consumer feedback via video. VyPops allows users to send out questions and receive video responses from consumers.
The Tech Barometer event takes place at Fairmont Recruitment’s offices in Mosley Street, Manchester, and will be hosted by Chris Maguire, executive editor of BusinessCloud.
It’s free to attend but spaces are strictly limited so register here.