Spotlight, now flush with $18M, helps CPG manufacturers automate product testing

Spotlight, an in-home product testing firm, raised $18 million in Collection A funding to proceed growing its know-how already serving to lots of of manufacturers check 1000’s of merchandise.

Dana Kim and Ethan Kellough began the corporate in 2020 after working in market analysis and engineering, respectively. Kim informed TechCrunch that performing bodily product analysis — the way in which it’s executed at present — sometimes includes a number of distributors, over 300 emails, many months and tens of 1000’s of {dollars}.

Spotlight co-founders Ethan Kellough and Dana Kim. Picture Credit: Spotlight

“The variety of SKUs on the grocery retailer cabinets is exploding,” Kim mentioned. “Thirty thousand merchandise launch yearly, and 95% of them fail. With 75 million SKUs on Walmart cabinets in the present day, there’s only a ton of danger and reward, however the level of product testing is actually to de-risk and allow product success.”

Because the tempo of innovation accelerates, so does the timeline that CPG corporations should innovate, Kim defined. On the testing aspect of issues, that has proven a necessity for real-time dashboards, agile insights and a fast flip up in knowledge assortment.

And that’s what Spotlight is attempting to do. The corporate automates that testing course of to convey all of these parts collectively into one platform. Clients can arrange their testing, get the product outcomes they want shortly and scale their testing over time.

Right now, the corporate has greater than tripled its income, workers and buyer base. It additionally calls lots of of high manufacturers as purchasers, together with Nestlé, Estée Lauder, P&G, Goal, Sakara and Hanes.

Earlier this 12 months, the corporate launched a shopper portal to automate every step of the product testing course of. This now finally turns these 300 emails right into a nine-minute motion with a number of clicks, Kim mentioned.

Manufacturers goal their viewers amongst a buyer neighborhood of over 25,000 “Highlighters,” sending their product to Spotlight and the corporate takes care of the remainder. Spotlight uploads the neighborhood suggestions as the info is available in.

Acre Enterprise Companions and HearstLab led the $18 million Collection A funding and had been joined by Ingeborg Investments and GS Futures. A bunch of angel traders, together with former Favor CEO Jag Tub and Subsequent Legacy Ventures managing director Ryan Nece, can be a part of the spherical. This brings Spotlight’s complete raised to this point to over $30 million.

Kim intends to make use of the brand new funding to speed up Spotlight’s product roadmap. This consists of providing a extra self-service expertise full with templates, wizards and greatest follow assets. As well as, the corporate needs to onboard the waitlist of “Highlighters” and iterate on their consumer expertise. Kim additionally needs so as to add extra workers.

“We now have actually cemented this superior place out there as the primary and solely product testing platform that means that you can get high quality knowledge on the agile timelines that you just need,” Kim mentioned. “We’re shifting from a product testing platform to a product intelligence platform. That’s why once we take into consideration options, it’s constructing on that unfair knowledge benefit and making that huge leap.”