Entrepreneurs like to juggle many balls, they say. Well Powata is the 3rd venture of Jean-Christophe Bouglé and Sophie Normand so it certainly true for them! Let’s hear their views on the challenge in the retail industry and the huge opportunity in front of them.
Well my first job was in Indonesia – I spent 3 years there working for a bank and it was a great experience. I came back in Europe for various experiences in this industry and I also created my first venture back in 1999, which was a fund that I sold shortly after.
I spent some years in the banking industry but I reached a level where it is inherently bureaucratic so in 2010 I decided to come back to Singapore, with the idea to create my business. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone the INSEAD MBA has been a trigger for me.
I started a business and a few months after I met Sophie Normand, who became my partner in crime in several startups since then:
It’s very simple: we build B2B mobile apps for the retail industry. As unbelievable as it may seem, store employees of big brands or retailers still use paper, or in the best case Whatsapp -but this is largely inefficient.
The staff don’t have the tools they need (offering features like geolocalized pictures, code scanning, e-signature, surveys, dashboard, etc) and brands simply don’t know what’s going on in the field. Very few reports, no dashboards -they have only a very rough picture of what’s happening in store. This is especially true for brands who sell through stores they don’t own, like Unilever which is a customer of ours.
We have three tiers of our apps:
Retail is a fascinating industry, every country is very different. For us, Indonesia and the Philippines are two big market. In the Philippines people largely use paper, you can imagine the opportunity.
Everyday in the news you can read about data-driven companies, big data or artificial intelligence. But the reality of the market for most retailers is that they don’t have much data to start with! We help them take the very first step and actually capture it digitally.
We really have a window of opportunity: in 5 years time everybody will probably think it’s just the norm but today it’s just the beginning. Whatsapp shows the need but doesn’t fill it.
This is what we provide with our apps. They can work offline, we can handle huge volumes of data and our solution is yper secure and GDPR compliant. We are very careful with our Customers’ data. We isolate them and we don’t sell any of it: our business is simple, we sell software.
We have a good traction, and we would like to accelerate. We are thinking to raise funds, and taking the time to do it properly is a challenge. We have two objectives:
Jean-Christophe Bouglé on LinkedIn