SignalFlare.ai, the exclusive provider of decision intelligence for multi-unit restaurants, is the winner of the 2024 Snowflake Startup Challenge. Now in its fourth year, the Snowflake Startup Challenge recognizes early-stage startups for their innovation in building software that relies on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. Mike Lukianoff, SignalFlare.ai CEO, said “This is more than a win for our team, it’s a win for the industry and our clients who will quickly see new features as the power of SignalFlare’s Decision Intelligence platform get a boost from Snowflake Cortex and the power of Enterprise AI.”
On Thursday, June 6th at Snowflake Summit 2024, SignalFlare.ai was named the 2024 Snowflake Startup Challenge winner. The panel of judges included Snowflake Co-founder and President of Product, Benoit Dageville; Snowflake CMO, Denise Persson; NYSE Group President, Lynn Martin and Altimeter Founder and CEO, Brad Gerstner. Initially selected from a pool of nearly 1,000 startups from over 100 countries – SignalFlare.ai was the only restaurant technology company to make the semifinal round. SignalFlare will ring the NYSE Bell on October 14, 2024.
SignalFlare is well positioned for success. Lukianoff has deep experience with restaurant data, having worked in the space for more than 25 years. He’s named in patents owned by a former employer, a juggernaut in the space; his prior venture, Czar Metrics was sold to Fishbowl enabling a larger sale to STG (Symphony Technology Group). SignalFlare.ai has capitalized on Lukianoff’s unique experience during a time of massive inflation and economic pressures for restaurants.
Michael Alberici, SVP and Head of Marketing of Smalls Sliders, explained, “As one of the fastest growing brands in the restaurant industry, we chose SignalFlare.ai as our pricing partner because of their speed and expertise in using hyper local data based on real consumer behavior. This allows to better understand what our price thresholds are as we enter new markets.”
SignalFlare.ai’s recognition is a win for the restaurant industry broadly – for both merchants and vendors. For merchants, the use of Snowflake’s clean rooms enables the sharing of highly sensitive information anonymously – a safer way to transfer and share data. For vendors, once SignalFlare has transformed a merchant’s data it can be the single source of truth, enabling faster integrations without ever having to change the source data. The trickle-down impact to consumers is smaller changes in price over shorter periods of time, to maintain brand integrity and value equation.
Stefan Williams, VP of Corporate Development and Snowflake Ventures, stated, “The Snowflake Startup Challenge is an incredible opportunity for early stage companies like SignalFlare to accelerate their time to market by embracing the AI Data Cloud. Congratulations to the SignalFlare team on taking home the win, and we look forward to cheering them on enthusiastically as they continue to revolutionize restaurant pricing with the Snowflake platform.”
Lukianoff professed, “Excellence in pricing science requires a deep knowledge of consumer purchases as well as the underlying demand potential. Most pricing companies lack the skills, data and domain expertise to bring all these elements together consistently and at scale.” SignalFlare.ai uses Snowflake to combine mobile data, credit card spending data, restaurant item level price data, regional economic data with a merchant’s proprietary data and delivers intelligent decision making for restaurant pricing, promotions and targeted marketing.
In its first year as a bootstrapped organization SignalFlare.ai has analyzed more than 2000 restaurant units and $4B in consumer transactions, landing clients such as: First Watch Restaurants, Authentic Restaurant Brands, Smalls Sliders, Freebirds World Burrito, Velvet Taco, Front Burner Brands and others. Now in its second year, SignalFlare is on track to triple its first year’s revenue. SignalFlare’s team includes industry veterans Jayne Strickland, Tammy K. Billings, Nathan Lockhart and Tracey Brennan and the most recent addition of Melissa Doolin-Koehne, formerly of Black Box Intelligence.
SignalFlare.ai’s Decision Intelligence powers smart decision-making systems for human decision-makers. SignalFlare’s clients improve speed to value by harnessing the power of statistics, data science and artificial intelligence in collaboration with industry experts. Learn more at: www.signalflare.ai