e.fundamentals becomes a CommerceIQ company

Just before midnight on Friday July 15, 2022 e.fundamentals was acquired and became a CommerceIQ Company. CommerceIQ is the leading Retail Ecommerce Management Platform, headquartered in Palo Alto, California. CommerceIQ have raised $200M in funding, with its most recent round led by Softbank at Unicorn valuation.

I’m thrilled and look forward to the next stage of the e.fundamentals journey with our new partners. For this, I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the journey to date and why I’m so excited about our future.

e.fundamentals was born in a meeting room with walls covered by flip charts. No one in that room could write a line of code, but we all had extensive experience in CPG, and having worked for some of the biggest brands, we were trying to answer one key question: What insights and tools will CPG managers need in order to win in eCommerce in the future?

We came up with some key-turning ideas that stood the test of time:

• Identify a set of digital shelf fundamentals that brands need to measure and optimize to market and sell effectively through online retailers
• Agree three principles that would guide the design of our platform
  • Don’t drown managers in data, show then insights relevant to their job
  • Make sure every insight is valuable and actionable
  • Prioritize ideas and language that already exists, bring the digital shelf to life through familiar in-store concepts
• Be bold and confident, don’t waste time trying to be a better version of the competition

We were so confident in our thinking that I made a huge life decision: Instead of retiring at 55, which had been my plan for many years, I decided to lead e.fundamentals. I loved our service idea, thought it was way better than the status quo in the market, and I wanted to demonstrate to myself that I could leverage my corporate experience to build a great company from scratch.

I made myself two promises: 1) We would be all about growth – growth for our people, our customers and our business. 2) We would build a great business by doing it the right way. Our values statement shows what “doing it the right way” means to us.

From the start, we aimed to win the world’s best CPG businesses as our clients. Focusing on the UK initially, we now report 451 retailers across 41 countries. Working with global brand leaders forced us to apply a Kaizen mindset of continuous improvement. We were, and are, able to do this by leveraging our modern tech stack and agile working practices.

Increasing our presence in the market, potential acquirers started approaching us. We set some simple tests to evaluate contenders. They had to have:

• A compelling strategic vision for the combined business
• A strong cultural fit
• A passion for delivering to customers
• A good valuation for our business based on current delivery and potential
• A brilliant team that would excite us to be part of and learn from

I’m thrilled to say that CommerceIQ delivered against every test. From our very first meeting (albeit on Zoom) Guru, CEO at CommerceIQ, and I knew that although from completely different backgrounds we shared the same deep ambition, values and passion.

The world is changing quickly around us and with US inflation at 40-year highs there certainly are challenges ahead for most businesses. We believe that our combined product suite and 12-month roadmap will ensure we are best placed to support our quickly expanding client base to deliver better quality earnings, digital shelf growth across all major retailers and accelerated productivity in the omnichannel.

Many stakeholders are involved in our journey – I’d like to thank our clients, suppliers, our investors (particularly the early ones who invested in nothing more than an idea) and the e.fundamentals Board for years of loyalty, patience and mentoring.

Above all, I’d like to thank all the employees at e.fundamentals for truly caring, going above and beyond to deliver excellence to our clients and believing. I’m very pleased that we get to move into the next chapter of our story together.