Rubikloud

Rubikloud was a Toronto-based software company specializing in artificial intelligence solutions for the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) sectors. Founded in 2013 by Kerry Liu, Frank Thomas, and Dan Theirl, the firm was established to address a gap in the market for leveraging the vast amounts of customer data collected by large enterprise retailers. CEO Kerry Liu, a non-technical founder with a background in accounting and sales, recognized that retailers struggled to make sense of data from incompatible legacy and cloud systems. This insight, born from his experience at an acquired startup, fueled the creation of Rubikloud, which began in Liu's condo with the goal of building a full-stack data and machine learning company focused on solving real-world business problems for retailers.

The company operated on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, providing a cloud-native AI platform designed to automate and enhance complex decisions in merchandising and marketing. Its clients were primarily multi-billion-dollar enterprise retailers and CPG manufacturers in the grocery, health, and beauty markets across North America, Europe, and Asia. Rubikloud's core business involved migrating extensive legacy data to a modern cloud infrastructure, creating a unified data source to drive its AI engines. The firm's two flagship products were Promotion Manager and Customer Lifecycle Manager. Promotion Manager offered automated demand forecasting for mass promotions, helping retailers optimize pricing and assortment to increase sales and reduce waste. Customer Lifecycle Manager served as a customer data platform that used AI to segment customers, enabling personalized marketing and loyalty campaigns across all channels.

Over seven years, Rubikloud raised a total of $45.1 million in funding through seed, Series A, and a notable $37.1 million Series B round in 2018 led by Intel. This growth supported the expansion of its team to over 100 employees and the opening of offices in London, Texas, and Hong Kong. On June 15, 2020, it was announced that Rubikloud would be acquired by Kinaxis, an Ottawa-based supply chain management software company, for $60 million USD. The acquisition, which closed on July 2, 2020, integrated Rubikloud's AI capabilities and its team of approximately 80 people into Kinaxis's RapidResponse platform, aiming to bolster its demand-planning features for the CPG industry and provide a strategic entry into the enterprise retail market.

Keywords: retail AI, CPG analytics, demand forecasting, promotion optimization, customer lifecycle management, loyalty marketing, prescriptive analytics, retail data platform, machine learning for retail, merchandise optimization, big data retail, SaaS for retail, Kerry Liu, Kinaxis acquisition, enterprise retail software, supply chain AI, promotion planning, customer segmentation, assortment optimization, AI decision automation