Halla

Halla is helping grocers improve their customer experience. Right now there is no artificial intelligence effectively matching food consumers with the products that are best for their tastes, budgets, and nutritional needs. For grocers that implement Halla, we have seen survey and live performance results ranging from 5% to 29% revenue increase. For consumers, better dietary choices and shopping experiences are created. In the long term, by understanding consumer preference we can forecast the demand of not only CPG products, but the commodities from which they are made. Forecasting analytics inferred from this understanding can severely reduce food waste - we have run a paid POC with Cargill to demonstrate this. Further, by understanding consumer preference we can nudge choices for product purchases to be healthier for the consumer, better for the environment, and local vs mass produced.

Right now we are making grocery shopping intelligent and personalized. With the data from this we can help tackle global issues affecting everyone: Food Waste. Malnutrition. Environmental Destruction.

40% of food produced is wasted. Over $1 trillion dollars/year. Wasted. Before reaching consumers. Simultaneously, ~800 million people around the world go to bed hungry each night. In order to feed the earth in 2050, we’ll need to make as much food over the next 25 years as we did in the previous 8,000. We don't do a good job making or eating this food right now.

- 1 in 3 people in the U.S. are obese.

- Malnutrition, in all its forms, is estimated to affect over 35% of children worldwide, and cost society $3.5 trillion annually.

- Producing just food that will be ultimately wasted contributes over 10% of global CO2 output.

- The U.S. spends more on diets per year than the money needed to feed all hungry people in the world.

With an artificial intelligence system specifically designed to understand the inefficiencies and disconnects in our food system, we can put large dents in these problems.

We provide APIs to grocers and food processors to optimize their operations. For grocers we help them promote the right products to the right consumers at the right time. For food processors we can forecast consumer demand of specific commodities to tell Cargill that they are about to produce 2 tons too many of aspartame to sell to Pepsi next quarter. For CPGs we can help guide product development not only to sell more effectively, reducing food waste + greenhouse gases, but also in a way that meets both the nutrition and pleasure requirements of their customers.

Halla's technology serves corporations and consumers alive. We will impact corporations by enabling a new era of business activities founded on presently non-existent intelligence. For consumers we will enable effortless healthy eating and better shopping experiences.

Halla is already the leader in grocery intelligence. We've outperformed the in-house AI recommendation systems of $100b retailers. Additionally, we've run a successful, paid POC with one of the world's largest food processors to optimize production and reduce waste.

Improvements in technology (cloud, AI, etc) over the last several years have unlocked the opportunity for companies like Halla to change the way industries operate. Leading food data companies collect data in antiquated ways and lack the powerful AI to draw insights at scale.

A sustainable food system will involve AI... We think that AI will be Halla.

We're the world's only grocery-specific AI. Our competition is RichRelevance, Monetate, Certona, Dynamic Yield, etc. These companies offer omni-channel personalization. Amazon generates 35% of their product sales from their recommendations. On Spotify, 66% of listens are personalized recommendations. Netflix, 75% of titles streamed. This tech does not exist for grocery. Our aforementioned competitors offer rudimentary recommendations from basic machine-learning models, and they do this for every vertical, electronics, skincare, grocery, fashion, ets. This horizontal nature to their solution is limiting. Halla is different. We've set out to conquer food. Recognizing that data is what drives the quality of AI, we formed in 2016 set up the data infrastructure and natural language processing to have unrivaled ability to deploy machine learning and deep learning models on unique and diverse data sets. When you go on a grocery website, you'll see Oreos recommended on pasta. This is the way of the past. Our AI understands what a human would think of that example recommendation. 

AI. We use machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing on a whole bunch of food data (over a billion data connections, hundreds of millions of grocery transactions, millions of menus, recipes, a proprietary ontology, macro and micronutrient data, etc) to license APIs via cloud.

https://www.marketingdive.com/news/accenture-lack-of-personalization-consumer-trust-cost-businesses-756b-la/512693/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/shephyken/2017/10/29/personalized-customer-experience-increases-revenue-and-loyalty/#50abc6e14bd6

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/how-retailers-can-keep-up-with-consumers

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2017/11/personalized-product-recommendations-drive-just-7-visits-26-revenue.html

The above links discuss the overwhelming validity of personalization. This has become maximally relevant for grocers, especially in the wake of COVID.

Further, we are happy to share more performance metrics upon meetings. We have seen affirming results in multiple different environments. Most recently, proving we work in store, via live deployment in a scan & go app for a supermarket chain in NY.

This is largely addressed in prior answers. #1 grocery is going online in earnest starting now. #2 the data from that change will change the way the food industry works. #3 there will be a handful of food focused AI companies facilitating that change.

We're currently live facing 25,000 consumers with hard plans to expand to ~350,000 by end of quarter. We are aiming to touch 5 million by 2022. In 5 years we hope to be touching 35-50 million consumers.

Paramount, in the next year we are looking to become cash flow positive powering personalization for grocers. 

Over the next 5 years we want to show that we can help grocers operate on better margins, improve consumer health and satisfaction from better choices guided by ai, and create a cash flow positive business unit using Halla's AI to reduce food waste.

We have to become cash flow positive powering personalization for grocers. From there, we have a world of opportunity.

We have become a sales organization. We have begun closing deals and are in talks or pilots with well over a *quarter trillion dollars* in grocery GMV. With 2-3 big clients we will be on our way to creating the future of food.

We have a Core Team of 11 which includes 2 contractors and 2 part-time.

We have a stellar advisory board of 5, soon to be 6, including some real superstars. Former CMO Sabra, Co-Founder & CTO Magento, CIO/CSO Apcera, etc, etc.

We have a diverse partner network of 12 companies, including corporate counsel, financial management, design, branding, media, pr, etc.

All in all ~30 people produce for Halla each week.

We have been at this for 4 years hypothesizing the rise of online grocery and building AI specifically for it. Now it's happening. Having raised just under $3m to date, we've been able to gather a truly exceptional team. The founders became friends in high school through passions for math, philosophy, science, and technology. We started while at three different colleges, ultimately dropping out to pursue Halla after raising 6 figures during sophomore year. Needless to say, we'd be nowhere if we didn't understand the value in surrounding ourselves with stellar individuals. Rick Wedgeworth, our Chief Scientist is the former principal architect of cloud computing at eBay. Toby Blue, our EVP of Strategy founded Petrol Advertising and after growing it to over 100 employees, became SVP of business development for i.am+ spearheading $117m in fundraising for the tech startup. Our advisory board is top tier. We've been lucky to get institutional funding from SOSV and build a great team and network of investors.

We're passionate about effecting positive change for the food industry through AI.

We work with anyone who has a digital interface through which groceries are sold. We license APIs.

We charge the licensees of our APIs per monthly active user. If Kroger has 100,000 monthly shoppers online they pay us x cents times 100,000. There is a small upfront integration fee.

We are people people. It seems the people behind SOLVE are people we would like. We want so deeply to effect positive change on our earth and we think that this is an important way of building our community to do so. Food is a special industry. It is the largest industry on earth. It is perhaps the only thing people love and need every day. We want to do whatever we can to make it better.

Good talent is the most important thing in the world. Further, we know we can help solve the world's problems, but we also know we don't know exactly how to do that... yet. We seek guidance from those who can help us understand how achieve these goals and connect us to the right people to make it happen.

First and foremost we would like to partner with grocers. Beyond that we would like to partner with any company looking to improve consumer nutrition or reduce food waste -- big food processors is probably the next step for Halla.

Not sure how qualification works, but lack of education and poor choice is the biggest problem in nutrition. Many studies have shown that poor nutrition in poor demographics is not because of accessibility. The food selections are often upwards of ~90% similar and consumer choice most frequently comes down to preference. This is an educational and systematic issue. An issue that is killing people every day. We think simple suggestions, almonds instead of Fritos, can change this.