FIT allocates CHF 500’000 to Datapred

Industrial buyers of raw materials operate in a challenging environment characterised by enormous pressure to reduce cost savings, high market volatility, and mountains of data to be analysed, slowing execution down and leaving no time for strategic thinking.  The current pandemic has even exacerbated these challenges for the energy and raw material markets. “The traditional concept of price volatility has failed to capture many aspects of the arising instability. Therefore, Chief Procurement Officers will need advanced insights to optimise buying decisions in the post-Covid-19 world”, explains Thomas Oriol, director of Datapred.

With its machine-learning software, Datapred helps industrial buyers of raw materials to centralise tens of internal and external data streams and make better buying decisions, saving up to 5% of their raw material spend, year over year.  Moreover, the solution provides industrial buyers with new opportunities to ‘trade around’ their assets – that is, to purchase based on the real-time combination of market trend predictions and operational cost/constraint optimisation.

Datapred was co-founded in 2017 by Nicolas Mahler, an engineer with a PhD in Machine Learning and experience in market finance, and Thomas Oriol, a tech entrepreneur with a background in economics and investment banking. Two years later, in 2019, Datapred was named a Cool Vendor by Gartner and won the international machine learning competition organised by Airbus. In 2020, the start-up is among the Top 50 Companies to Watch by Spend Matters and closed its first institutional fundraising round with Berlin-based JOIN Capital.

The FIT Growth loan adds to the funds obtained in its investment round and will for further development of the company. Datapred plans to expand internationally with a focus on Germany, and the FIT loan will help the expansion.

(Press release/RAN)