Startup interview: Alon Gilady, CEO and Co-founder, renovai

RTIH gets the lowdown on renovai, an Israeli startup which recently announced the closing of a seed round of $3.7 million.

RTIH: Tell us about yourself and renovai.

AG: renovai provides visual AI shopping assistance for lifestyle brands.

We are a B2B2C company, covering all shopper-retailer touchpoints from studio materials creation and 3D models, through real-time hyper personalised online recommendations to in-store digital jaw dropping experiences.

I consider myself to be an entrepreneur at heart, always have been since I can remember. renovai is a part of me, a living and breathing organism that adapts and changes according to demand and evolving technology.

I love the fact that our solution is on the one hand so technologically advanced but on the other becoming a basic commodity that shoppers expect for furniture retailers and brands to provide.

RTIH: What was the inspiration behind setting the brand up?

AG: Me and Alon, one of the other two co-founders, had a 3D visualisation studio for interior designers, which was our gateway to the virtual design realm.

We understood the market better and the fact that it's a very expensive service most people don't use.

We aim to reshape online experiences and make interior design and styling much more accessible, seamless and fun even for those who lack experience.

Most people didn’t buy furniture online. They needed to feel the fabric, see how soft or hard it was and obviously get a good sense of how it would fit and match in their homes.

We understood these needs, found the way to bridge the bricks and mortar online gap and started partnering with innovative and customer centric retailers to get our solutions out there.

RTIH: What has been the industry reaction thus far?

AG: We have been very lucky to partner with Temple & Webster, Australia's leading furniture and home décor retailer which gave us X-ray vision of the end customer’s needs and the ability to perfect and optimise our solutions using their website as our playground.

Since our implementation process is short and easy, we quickly gained traction with big brands that started to see amazing results with minimal resources invested from their end.

RTIH: What has been your biggest challenge/setback?

AG: Fundraising during the pandemic has been a challenge but we overcame it and closed our seed round a few weeks ago.

In the beginning of the pandemic brands weren't keen on testing new technologies, but with the lockdowns and social distancing they realised our technology is a must, so we got back on track quickly.

Our solutions are very impressive and as such sometimes it really takes us a lot of time to convince companies how easy it will be for them to integrate.

RTIH: What are the biggest challenges facing the omnichannel retail sector right now?

AG: Changing consumer behavior and expectations, finding the right balance between e-commerce and physical store investments, distinguishing your brand, and providing memorable holistic experiences, naturally creating brand ambassadors.

A lot of companies are struggling to create a coherent unified data stream that is crucial as the baseline of perfected omnichannel experiences.

The sooner their will handle all technical aspects the better.

They will be able to keep up and even exceed digital first innovative brands by investing in true game changing technologies that are seamless but most importantly inspiring and adaptable for each shopper.

RTIH: What's the best question about your brand asked of you recently by an investor and/or a customer?

AG: How is our technology different than all the other solutions out there? I love explaining to people we are the only ones that work based on true design knowledge, it's like our algorithm went to design school.

Our AI can really design and while others use deep tagging for surfacing the right products for people. We took it further with our correlated deep tagging methodology, exploring the optimal connections between items and putting them in a personalised context.

Very few companies, if any, have the deep technical understanding required for creating and scaling these types of solutions.