AI will finally crack scalable competitive intelligence for SMBs: enter RivalSense
The OxBridge graduate founder duo of Martins Vaivars and Arturs Prieditis are not newbies in the startup rodeo, having founded several companies, including a TechStars-backed startup. But this time they have the strong winds of the AI revolution at their backs. I have reviewed competitive intelligence solutions as both a user and a potential investor for years, and all of them end up becoming unscalable enterprise consulting businesses, as they struggle to provide enough value at scale for small and medium-sized businesses. As a result, the main tool to gather intelligence on competitors that SMBs use is good ol’ Google Alerts. Though free, it generates a rag-bag of repeating, random, and false positive hits that any owner, manager, or CEO needs to sift through in order to find that valuable insight that is actionable.
But now with large language models, RivalSense has built a tool that can automate this process, taking data from over 80 sources, including competitor websites and social media, and distilling the relevant information into one weekly insight email that arrives in your inbox. At just 49.99 Euros per month, this is affordable for most small businesses, given the relevance of the insights. As an example, in the first week after launch, one of RivalSense’s users noticed in an insight that one of their fiercest competitors had silently removed a key client logo from their website. The user immediately sent this to their sales team to action an outreach.
RivalSense is very early in its journey, but given the crack team building this tool and the wide open competitive landscape, we decided to back this team early, leading a small angel round aimed at completing the product and testing out product-market fit hypotheses. We are delighted to be joined by our friends at Fiedler Capital.
We look forward to the next stages of this exciting journey alongside the RivalSense team. If you are a startup or a small business in a traditional industry, sign up to try out the service: www.rivalsense.co.
Andris K. Berzins
Partner
