Luca, a San Francisco, CA-based startup building price planning and prediction tools for retailers, announced that it closed a $2.5 million seed funding.
The round was led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator (Luca was in Y Combinator’s winter 2023 class), Soma Capital, and angel investors.
The funding will be put toward expanding Luca’s engineering and data science teams.
Mann describes Luca as a “pricing co-pilot for enterprise retailers.” In plain English, it’s a platform that taps AI to identify revenue and margin headroom, make recommendations for price adjustments, and measure the outcomes.
“Post pandemic, most retailers are feeling growth and margin pressures due to higher customer acquisition costs, reduced consumer spending and rising interest rates,” Yonah Mann, co-founder of Luca, said. “Most retail software-as-a-service tooling out there rarely directly impacts business metrics, whereas retail executives we’ve interviewed are actively looking for revenue optimization opportunities … That’s where we come in – our solution creates direct and measurable business value.”
Company: Luca Software Inc.
Raised: $2.5M
Round: Seed Round
Funding Month: April 2023
Lead Investors: Menlo Ventures
Additional Investors: Y Combinator and Soma Capital
Company Website: https://www.askluca.com/
Software Category: AI-based Pricing Co-Pilot for E-Commerce Businesses
About the Company: Founded by Tanvi Surti and Yonah Mann, Luca is a developer of a smart pricing platform for e-commerce and marketplaces designed to assist operators in deciding the prices of their products and when to update their prices. The company's platform offers a flexible tool that empowers operators to find a pricing strategy that works for their business goals, offers smart pricing recommendations, and also offers machine learning-based customer price elasticities to target precise margin and revenue outcomes for businesses, enabling businesses to have a platform that assists with revenue optimization. The company is on a mission to bring revenue optimization tools to retail and to build a diverse, kind, and fun company as they go along!.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/27/luca-raises-cash-for-pricing-optimization/