Hub:raum in the cloud with ciValue

Nov 25, 2015

• ciValue helps high-frequency retailers to personalize the shopping experience of their customers
• Israeli startup offers cloud-based big-data platform

hub:raum, Deutsche Telekom’s incubator, invests in its twelfths startup: the Israeli company ciValue.

ciValue, founded in April 2014, offers a cloud-based big-data platform to support retailers in modernizing their customer loyalty strategy. With ciValue, retailers’ are able to provide customers with a unified personal experience on all sales channels, so that customers feel at home in THEIR store. Customers can have their own personalized shopping list, get special offers on the products they love, receive timely purchase reminders, and more.

The machine learning algorithms developed by cIValue understand customers needs and preferences from their historical shopping behavior and other contextual data, and allows retailers to automatically create custom views and offers for each customer. This helps retailers to avoid losing money on ineffective blanket promotions or marketing spends.

“We were immediately convinced by the idea and the team. The founders having worked in different companies or as professor are highly experienced and have deep know how which is linked with an entrepreneurial spirit. And we see huge potential in their business idea. Local retailers are under pressure by the online merchants. ciValue offers them a great service to extend their customer relations”, says Peter Borchers, founder and head of hub:raum.

Going from pitch-deck to a revenue generating company in two years, ciValue now works with the market leading pharmacy chain in Israel with a growing international presence, to send millions of personalized offers to customers every month.

Highly experienced team

ciValue’s principal founder Beni Basel has over 20 years of experience. He first encountered the need for such a service as Vice President of a major global software provider.”Working closely with clients, it became apparent that retailers were losing money on ineffective blanket promotions and marketing spend, and while there were some legacy firms offering personalization it was a slow and labor-intensive process”, explains Basel the reason for founding ciValue After leaving his position he rekindled his entrepreneurial spirit and came together his colleagues Gilad Cohen and Tzahi Rosen, seasoned tech veterans and domain experts in their own right to form ciValue.