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Today, we’re excited to share two important milestones for AlgoGroup: our seed funding and the latest iteration of our Launch Program for emerging pet brand owners.
Announcing Our $1mm Seed Round
We’ve raised a $1mm seed round led jointly by FoundFast and Primest Capital, with participation from notable angel investors including Thomas Hill (previously Founder of Clicksit before exit to Sorted). The fundraise, comprising a mix of debt and equity, equips AlgoGroup not only with financial resources to execute on our vision, but also an active shareholder base with thought leaders in sectors spanning technology, finance, legal and industry.
Solving Problems for Emerging Pet Brand Owners
Our vision is to become Asia’s leading tech-enabled pet brand platform, specialising in the organic growth, management and selective acquisition of pet care, food and related brands. We do so through a proprietary process that quickly identifies, validates and then integrates emerging brands into our house brand portfolio using e-commerce and technology.
We see three big pain points for emerging brands in the pet sector:
Trend Identification: emerging brand owners lack access to deep data points on trends and consumer preferences in the diverse pet product sector, often executing on speculation-driven R&D to create new products. This is particularly rampant in the pet sector, where pet parents themselves become first time founders armed with a strong emotive desire to create better products for their fur-children.
Product Validation: Emerging brand owners then often spend wasteful amounts on marketing to test product market fit, iterate, and validate their products for a particular geography. Running marketing campaigns to capture a large share of voice for a small number of SKUs can be cost prohibitive in a sea of new pet products.
Brand Integration: owners who find some traction waste further time and energy trying to find distributors who may not have aligned interests, or face rejections from investors who cannot justify financing pure R&D or marketing costs. These players only want to bet on “sure wins”, leaving behind an overlooked class of emerging brand owners.
With a proprietary approach that uses e-commerce and technology curated for the pet sector, AlgoGroup is here to change that dynamic.
Announcing Our latest Launch Programs
With our investors' support, we will roll-out go-to-market programs (“Launch Programs”) in Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom throughout 2024. Each program is designed to provide emerging brand owners with:
Direct customer insights: with a track record of distributing over 200 pet brands on directly owned and third party marketplaces, brand owners will have first hand data on customer preferences and localisation techniques through Algo+, a cloud-based dashboard showing real time sales & performance data across active regions.
Improved marketing efficiency: by crafting cross-sales strategies between launch program brands and mass-market brands, then optimizing marketing initiatives through data, we offer emerging brands a pathway to sharply increase marketing efficiency by up to 10 folds. The end result is a quick and cost-effective product validation process.
Funding and co-ownership options: a pilot program in 2022 prior to Algo’s founding saw over 20 emerging brand sign-ups, two of which became integrated into AlgoGroup’s house brand portfolio through equity-linked partnerships. With extra funding, we intend to increase emerging brand sign-ups by 5x across multiple geographical regions, with the ultimate goal of co-ownership and integration of outstanding pet concepts into our house of brands.
Join Us in Shaping the Pet Product Sector
The funding round presents an incredible opportunity for AlgoGroup to revolutionise the pet product industry using e-commerce and technology, and we’re looking for like-minded individuals to join us on our mission.
If you think AlgoGroup is a fit for you, check out our list of open positions.