I’m quite sure that if you’d ask founders what drove them to start a new business, you’d get many different answers.  The same would apply to the question about the rewards, which made it worthwhile.  For me, the biggest rewards are the experiences made during the process and the beauty of walking the new path, making bold strategic decisions in collaboration with the most professional and amazing team imaginable.  This announcement is one of those moments, which I surely will remember and often reflect on.  Today we’re announcing our acquisition of Brennus Analytics, an exciting French start-up offering a modular, proprietary, transparent, and configurable artificial intelligence (“AI”) technology providing complex optimization capabilities highly applicable to the challenges of a B2B environment.  This is the first such acquisition in the history of Pricefx!

The journey started upon our successful closing of the Series B funding round – a key component of that funding was to drive strategic acquisitions to accelerate our growth and market dominance through continuous product enhancement.  While enabling and integrating external AI and ML solutions and libraries have been capabilities long offered by Pricefx, it felt that having our own proprietary AI capability highly applicable to Pricefx’s approach of “doing it right or not doing it at all”, was the way to go.  Brennus Analytics clearly stood out with a highly applicable approach, great tech, and talent as well as a very appealing and fitting company culture.  By adding them to our Family, we will now offer a B2B relevant, flexible, transparent, and versatile solution with leading innovation that will radically enhance our pricing optimization capability for our customers.

I often talk and write about us thinking long term and setting us up for the lasting success delivering on our mission of “bringing Pricing to the people” by offering the fastest to implement, friendliest to use and adopt, most flexible and affordable advanced technology in a transparent and bullshit-free way.  I believe that this acquisition will provide us with an exceptional opportunity to add high-performing AI tech and science talent to our team, in the most complimentary and relevant way possible. The innovations from Brennus will enable Pricefx to deliver strategic product enhancements that will put us in a stronger position in the price optimization landscape.

Given the current challenges to the global economy, this may seem to be a risky move.  However, I am convinced that it will make Pricefx much stronger.  Combining Brennus’ innovations in AI for pricing with our ability to productize and commercialize at scale will allow us to bring to market the unparalleled B2B price optimization solution.  In addition, Brennus’ French roots will improve our regional customer support and expand our ability to commercially operate in a market we feel has great growth potential.

This acquisition is the logical next step in Pricefx’s growth story.  As you know, we always first consider all opportunities for partnership, thanks to our unique platform capabilities, commitment to a well-functioning ecosystem, and an amazing team in charge of it. But in some cases, the synergies can be so high that the best solution is to fuse. I remember a question from one of our employees during our Town Hall at our All Hands meeting in Prague about our acquisition plans and how those might impact our strategy and the unique culture we have been able to build and preserve. Please rest assured, we are not changing our culture or modus operandi because of the acquisition.  This is very much the result of another player in the market looking at us and deciding: “we want to be part of that”.  We looked at them, saw an awesome team and technology, and decided: “let’s bring them in”.

Comprised primarily of accomplished AI and data science professionals, all of Brennus’ employees will join our Pricefx Family, effective immediately.  They will strengthen our engineering, product strategy, customer, sales, and marketing teams, providing a tremendous opportunity for all employees (both old and new) to learn from each other, as our expertise in the pricing market aligns well.

I hope you share my excitement and will join me in welcoming the great team of Brennus Analytics to our Family.  I’m sure they will appreciate being welcomed and embraced by all of you sharing our core values of respect, integrity, support, and genuine friendliness.

Stay healthy, stay positive, and stay bullish!

Cheers, Marcin.

Who is Brennus Analytics?

Based in France, Brennus Analytics has developed pricing optimization software based on AI technology called “Adaptive Multi Agent System” (AMAS).  AMAS technology is predictive, prescriptive, transparent, fast, and flexible and highly applicable to the B2B environment.  Devised as a paradigm in the 1990s by the Toulouse Research Institute in Computer Science (IRIT), AMAS is based on self-organizing autonomous agent networks, comparable to a living organism.  The system is able to self-adapt and cooperate to converge towards an optimum, taking into account numerous constraints; it is particularly well-suited for large scale optimization and continuous learning.

Why did we decide to acquire Brennus Analytics?

Partnering with Brennus will enable Pricefx to bring on more than a dozen highly talented AI and data science professionals in one efficient move.  The AI technology they have built and continue to work on provides us a rapid path to deepen the capabilities of our Price Optimizer module and address customer demand for stronger AI solutions.  With a customer footprint in France, Brennus also allows us to expand our reach into that region and open new revenue streams with cross-selling and upselling strategies.

What is the impact on our customers?

In terms of our day-to-day operations and the quality of the support our customers have come to expect from us, this change will have no impact.  But, what will change is our ability to provide significantly enriched and enhanced, high-quality result driven pricing optimization, highly relevant to problems our customers are struggling with and looking for ways to solve.  Brennus’ customers, will have a unique opportunity to extend the functional footprint of their solutions way beyond just price optimization, which should significantly increase the value of and return on their investments.  For our joined prospects and future customers, who for sure will ask us “does your solution use AI”, we will finally be able to confidently respond “YES!, and one that really makes a difference”, and show them our expanded capability in optimization.  Lastly, our customers will from time to time see some new faces in our team meetings as we welcome our new colleagues to their roles within Pricefx!