What: French start-up Neuralk-AI secures USD 4 million to develop its retail-focused foundation model for tabular data analysis.

Why it is important: As retailers lose 4.5% of gross sales due to inefficiencies, Neuralk-AI's technology addresses critical operational challenges in product catalogue management and inventory optimisation.

Neuralk-AI has secured nearly USD 4 million in pre-seed funding, including debt financing, to accelerate the development of its specialised AI foundation model. The French start-up, founded by a polytechnician and a PhD student in computational neuroscience, has attracted investment from Fly Ventures and StemAI funds, alongside notable AI investors including Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf and Mirakl co-founder Philippe Corrot.

The company's innovative approach combines transformer architectures with neural networks to address the limitations of existing deep learning models in handling tabular data. Already serving major retailers like E. Leclerc, Auchan, and Mirakl, Neuralk-AI's technology has demonstrated significant success in catalogue management, where duplicate detection alone can represent millions in incremental sales. Available via API, the solution extends beyond catalogue cleaning to encompass predictive analytics, customer behaviour analysis, and supply chain optimisation. The company plans to expand its tech and sales teams whilst targeting a second funding round by late 2025.

IADS Notes: Recent retail industry developments underscore the timeliness of Neuralk-AI's solution. In August 2024, Walmart demonstrated the potential of AI in retail by processing 850 million product catalogue data points, significantly improving operational efficiency. This aligns with June 2024 findings showing the retail sector leading in AI deployment, with nearly half of retailers reporting increased revenue from their initiatives. The investment in Neuralk-AI comes as the global retail pricing optimisation software market is projected to reach USD 1.6 billion in 2024, reflecting the growing demand for sophisticated AI solutions in retail operations.

French AI start-up secures USD 4M for its retail data specialist AI