Nike announced its purchase of Boston-based Celect, a retail predictive analytics, and demand sensing startup, as its first acquisition of the year. Founded in 2013, the startup's AI-driven analytics platform gives retailers the ability to better predict and meet inventory needs. Celect claims to be able to increase full-price sell-through, reduce out-of-stocks, and decrease markdowns by focusing on delivering data insights after being fed a bunch of structured and unstructured retail data.
This acquisition is part of the shoe giant's efforts to be insight-driven, data-optimized, and hyper-focused on consumer behavior, thus enabling the company to serve consumers more personally at scale.
According to Crunchbase, Celect has raised a total of $30.2 million over four rounds from investors, including August Capital, NGP Capital, and Activant Capital.
