Stonehenge Technology Labs collects data. And it wants consumer packaged goods companies to gain meaningful use from it. The company announced $2 million in seed funding for its STOPWATCH commerce enhancement software.
The round was led by Irish Angels, with participation from Bread and Butter Ventures, Gaingels, Angeles Investors, Bonfire Ventures, and Red Tail Venture Capital.
Backstory of Stonehenge Technology Labs
CEO Meagan Kinmonth Bowman founded the Arkansas-based company in 2019 after working at Hallmark. There she was tasked with the digital transformation of the company.
“This was not a consequence of them not being good marketers. But they didn’t have the technology to connect their back end with retailers like Amazon, Walmart, or Hobby Lobby,” she said.
Kinmonth Bowman and her team recognized that there was a missing middle layer connecting the world of dot-com with brick and mortar. By applying the middle layer to the enterprise resource plans and integrate public and private data feeds, a company could be just as profitable online as it could be in traditional retail.
Stonehenge’s answer to that is STOPWATCH, which takes in over 100 million rows of data per workspace per day, analyzes the data points, adds real-time alerts, and provides the right data to the right people at the right time.
How does their technology work?
The platform was originally created as a subsidiary of a consulting company. But in 2018, one of their clients told them they just wanted the software rather than also paying for the consulting piece. The business was split, and Stonehenge went underground for eight months to make a software product specifically for the client.
Kinmonth Bowman admits the technology itself is not that sexy. It uses exact transfer loads to extract data from hundreds of systems into a “lake house”. Then silo it by retailer and other factors and then present the data in different ways. For example, the CEO will want different metrics than product teams.
Future plans with the funding
Over the past year, the company has doubled its revenue and also doubled the number of contracts. It already counts multiple Fortune 100 companies and emerging brands as some of its early users and plans to use the new funding to hire a sales team and go after some strategic relationships.
Stonehenge Technology Labs is also working on putting together a diverse workforce that mimics the users of the software, Kinmonth Bowman said. One of the challenges has been to get unique talent to move to Arkansas.
Meanwhile, Brett Brohl, managing partner at Bread and Butter Ventures, said the Stonehenge team “is just crazy enough, smart and driven” to build something great.
Big companies have been around long enough. But not many of them have done a good job digitizing their business. Pre-COVID they were already building various digital transformations but the pandemic accelerated the need for that technology. This hit a lot of companies in the face. And customers saw that too.
Hence, understanding the need of its customers played in the favour of STOPWATCH. It went from paper to Excel spreadsheets to the next cloud modification. The time is right for the next leap and how to use data.