Peak Raises $21 Million Series B Funding To Enable Businesses To Do Great Things With Their Data

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Below is our recent interview with Richard Potter, CEO of Peak:

Q: Peak was founded in 2014, could you tell us Peak story?

A: The idea for Peak was realized in a Manchester pub – the original epicentre of communities, idea exchanges and attitude! We had a napkin – with doodles of course – of the first drawing of what the Peak’s Decision Intelligence Software could be. This picture now hangs in our office and reminds us that we’ve all come a long way since we had the idea but our search for original perspectives, innate curiosity and our ability to reimagine the world, remains at the heart of what we are today.

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Q: You’ve recently raised $21 Million in Series B funding; can you tell us something more?

A: AI adoption in businesses saw a rapid acceleration in 2020 as companies looked for new ways to boost sales and maximize profits. This is especially true for the many firms prioritizing digital transformation in the wake of evolving consumer demands.

This was particularly pronounced in 2020 and led to an increase in the already growing demand for ‘Decision Intelligence’; software that embeds AI into decision making to drive commercial performance. The impact has supercharged Peak’s revenues in 2020 (doubled) and Peak’s margins have continued to be best in class.

Peak’s mission has always been to enable businesses to do great things with their data, and for Peak’s customers to grow their businesses. Peak’s Decision Intelligence Software software is processing 570TB, making 200,000,000 predictions and 2,600,000 automated decisions for our customers every single day.

Q: How can your software help businesses?

A: When starting a project of work, Peak connects all elements of a customer’s data, such as their sales, marketing, inventory, product, warehouse and supply data into Peak’s CODI system Peak’s Decision Intelligence software), where it is combined to create a single source of intelligence across all business functions. These inputs may include data from CRM, analytics and website data, ERP, WMS, data warehouses and data lakes, and third party data. CODI includes an in-built SQL Explorer to query and transform data into modular building blocks that can be sequenced as part of an AI workflow.

The CODI system can be used by data science teams and non-technical teams alike.

CODI has an intuitive visual interface for orchestrating all the building blocks of an AI solution into an end-to-end AI Pipeline. Peak’s in-house team of data scientists can manage the entirety of this phase enabling a business user to easily apply CODI to make faster, more accurate, more consistent commercial decisions.

For data science teams, CODI makes it incredibly straightforward and fast for data scientists to train and configure sophisticated AI and ML models using a range of in-built tools. CODI includes in-built workspaces for Jupyter Hub and RStudio that can be configured in one-click, removing any MLOps requirement for the user.

The resulting outputs provide predictions and suggested actions for users to take. These ‘decisions’ can either be deployed within CODI itself through one of Peak’s applications, or connected directly to existing business systems with scalable, on-demand APIs with a single click.

Here’s an example of this in practice, all powered by CODI:

• Peak enables PrettyLittleThing to use hyper-targeted social segments, which increased new customer acquisitions on social across existing and emerging markets

• What Peak does – CODI enabled PrettyLittleThing to identify high-value customers with AI, using an ensemble of AI modelling techniques. All taking into account factors such as product preferences, average order values and frequencies, and propensity to purchase.

• Data – All historical and live customer data from across the business, including transactional, customer and product data, alongside customer behavioural data from Google Analytics.

• Outcomes from CODI – “Peak’s AI-powered advertising techniques have allowed us to achieve some key results in a very short space of time. These include an increase in new customer acquisition, a higher number of sessions on site, and a huge improvement in campaign click-through-rates. Peak continuously refreshes our AI-powered customer data view regularly, ensuring that every ad we serve is as relevant to our audience as possible.” Matt Holmes, Head of Digital Marketing, PrettyLittleThing.

Q: What’s the best thing about Peak that people might not know about?

A: We’re proud to have grown our company from Manchester – it’s the city that has been at the heart of countless revolutions, from the industrial revolution of the 1800s to the cultural revolution of the 1990s.

When we first started to look for seed funding back in 2016, being based in the north west had its limitations. Thankfully, we had the support of the likes of Tech North (now Tech Nation) and met our investors at TechCrunch Disrupt in London. It’s safe to say that we’ve spent a lot of time on the train from Manchester to London over the years. I hope that companies like ourselves and Mattillion can play a part in growing a deeper software tech scene in the north west region and drive the next revolution from Manchester!

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Q: What are your plans and goals for the future?

A: This Series B funding round will fuel an ambitious global expansion to meet strong demand, with new offices opening across the USA and India. We also have customers based in the Netherlands, the UAE etc, working on-site and currently across Zoom. So, maybe one day we’ll have offices in all those locations!

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