Funding and Expansion:
- AI Palette secures $5.7 million in funding, led by Tin Men Capital, for a total funding of $11.2 million.
- The funds will be used to expand the AI-powered platform, focusing on sales and marketing growth, sector diversification, and geographical expansion.
Platform Overview:
- AI Palette’s platform, embraced by industry leaders, comprises three components: Foresight Engine, Concept Genie, and Screen Winner.
- The platform utilises AI to analyse images and text from diverse sources, empowering consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies to identify trends, generate innovative product concepts, and evaluate their viability efficiently.
Innovation Acceleration:
- Ai Palette emphasises its platform’s ability to speed up and de-risk the innovation process, enabling businesses to identify market needs, create, and screen concepts in a day.
- Leveraging extensive datasets, the platform offers a cost-effective and time-efficient alternative to traditional market research methods.
FoodGPT Chatbot:
- Introduced in the late part of the previous year, FoodGPT is a generative AI chatbot complementing the platform.
- Clients can enhance the chatbot’s knowledge by uploading proprietary market reports, and it resonates well with users accustomed to generative AI tools like ChatGPT.
Singapore’s startup AI Palette has secured $5.7 million in a recent funding round led by Tin Men Capital, alongside support from Exfinity Ventures and pi Ventures.
Founded in 2018 by ex-Givaudan executive Somsubhra Gan Choudhuri and big data expert Himanshu Upreti, the startup plans to utilise the funds to expand its AI-powered platform.
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The investment, bringing Ai Palette’s total funding to $11.2 million, will fuel the growth of its sales and marketing team, extend its presence beyond the food and beverage sector into beauty and personal care, and broaden the platform’s geographical reach.
The company’s innovative end-to-end platform empowers clients to swiftly identify trends, generate new product concepts, and screen them with the assistance of the FoodGPT chatbot.
Ai Palette’s widely embraced platform, utilised by industry leaders such as Nestlé, Symrise, ADM, Kellogg, Mondelēz International, Diageo, Cargill, and Himalaya Wellness, is built on three integral components:
Foresight Engine: This foundational insights platform employs AI to meticulously analyse images and text sourced from retail e-commerce platforms, menus, recipes, social media posts, and search engines across 18 languages in 24 countries. Its purpose is to empower consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies in recognizing unmet consumer needs and staying ahead of emerging trends.
Concept Genie: Introducing a cutting-edge tool utilising generative AI, Concept Genie leverages data gleaned from the Foresight Engine to create innovative product concepts. This feature adds a dynamic element to the platform, fostering creativity and adaptability in product development.
Screen Winner: A crucial concept screening tool designed to assist users in evaluating the viability of new product concepts within specific categories or markets. By offering insights and analysis, Screen Winner aids in making informed decisions about the potential success of ideas in the ever-evolving consumer landscape.
While emphasising the ongoing importance of traditional tools like consumer testing for real-world refinement and validation, the company underscores that Ai Palette empowers businesses to swiftly pinpoint trends and needs within specific target markets.
By leveraging extensive data sets, the platform enables the generation of tailored product concepts effortlessly, offering a cost-effective and time-efficient alternative to more traditional market research methods.
“It speeds and de-risks the innovation process,” Gan Choudhuri told newsmen. “Using more traditional approaches where you have to coordinate with multiple stakeholders and market research companies, creating new concepts can take three to six months. Now you can identify a market need, create, and screen a concept in a day.”
FoodGPT
Ai Palette’s FoodGPT, a generative AI chatbot introduced in the late part of last year, has the capability to offer supplementary insights. According to Gan Choudhuri, clients can enhance the chatbot’s knowledge by uploading their proprietary market reports and other information onto Ai Palette’s platform, complementing the data gathered from internet scraping.
“We’re working with a few chosen customers on this because FoodGPT is customised for each client and we have to set up a private cloud for each company to ensure its proprietary data is not accessible by anyone else using our platform. We’re seeing that this tool resonates a lot with customers because they are used to using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.”
He added: “Our [new] Concept Genie tool is also more popular than we had expected; every day, we see clients generating tons of concepts and images.”
“Ai Palette’s ability to deliver real-time insights derived from a vast dataset of over 61 billion data points empowers businesses to capitalise on nuanced consumer trends across various demographics and geographical regions. This not only enhances success rates but also propels revenue growth through swift market penetration strategies.” Jeremy Tan, co-founder and partner, Tin Men Capital
Ai Palette, headquartered in Singapore with an engineering hub in Bangalore, India, utilises proprietary technology to deliver insights across 18 languages and 24 countries. The company employs a blend of predictive analytics, natural language processing, and computer vision to capture trends from a diverse range of data sources.
Longer term, AI has the potential to transform new product development, claimed Gan Choudhuri. By looking at what people type into search engines about their health concerns, what they’re cooking at home, or what they’re researching online, companies can anticipate trends, rather than constantly looking in the rear-view mirror, he said.
“The key benefit is reducing the time it takes to develop new products,” he explained. “The next big benefit is that you’re making decisions based on millions of data points versus what 100 people are telling you in a [traditional] market report, so you can have more confidence in your decision making.
“There’s a lot of demand for generic AI capabilities specifically for the food and beverage community now, and we’re uniquely positioned to address it.”
