Meet Claire Bretton, co-founder of recently acquired Daco.io
Claire Bretton will be featured on Station F’s Monthly Facebook live on January 8 at 12:30pm CET. Please join us on Facebook to ask her and her cofounders questions about her startup, acquisition, life at Station F and more.
Claire is the co-founder of Daco, an AI-based retail analytics startup that recently got acquired by the vente-privee group. And that, only within a year of joining the vente-privee Impulse program at STATION F.
This marks our second (public) acquisition that is also female co-founded, an important statement in diversity for us. From strategy consultant to entrepreneur and now product owner at vente-privee, Claire tells us about her entrepreneurial journey.
What are the beginnings of Daco?
daco was founded by 3 former strategy consultants and deep learning / big data experts. Anis, Paul and I all met during our previous experience at Advancy. Working with several ready-to-wear retailers, we identified their common need for competitive data and decided to come together thanks to our great complementarity: Anis is a deep learning expert, Paul is passionate about fashion and knows all about this sector, and I have an expertise in big data.
How does the Daco technology work?
Every retail brand carries out competitive benchmark of some sort throughout the year. In the past, brands had to manually gather data, segment offers product by product, and finally carry out all the analysis they needed.
We are here to help. Our in-house technology leverages the latest artificial intelligence and image recognition research to align millions of products on relevant segmentation, help retailers anticipate product demand, and define strong price markets down to sub-category level.
Daco joined the vente-privee acceleration program at STATION F then got acquired by the group itself. How did it happen?
After joining the program in November 2017, we started to test our technology with VP Tech teams to prove both our tool’s business impact for VP group teams and the robustness of the technology in itself. After 6 months of tight collaboration, we agreed on the important potential of our technology for VP and joined the group.
Has your role as a founder changed?
Actually, our roles as founders have not changed a lot! We are still responsible for our tech scaling, our tool utilization inside VP group and their business impact.
Our first months in VP group have been very positive! Start-up integration into a large group is always a challenge; but VP group teams are driven by innovation, they want to be involved in tech change, it is a real pleasure to work with them.
Do you have more questions for Claire? Send them through the comments section below and Claire, as the special guest for our next Monthly Live News, will answer them! Tune in on the STATION F Facebook/Instagram on January 8th at 12PM CET to join the conversation.
