Forwrd, a leading provider of automated predictive analytics aimed at guiding business decision making, announced today that the company secured $3.5 million in seed funding to transform non-technical frontline employees into data driven decision makers. The funding round was led by Angular Ventures along with various angel investors to increase their R&D team and kick-start their go-to-market.
“In my previous position as Senior Vice President at WalkMe, I guided companies through the digital transformation process and was shocked by how much of their data was left dormant and unused, simply because there are not enough resources to extract business value from it,” says Kobi Stok, Chief Executive Officer at Forwrd. “We think of Forwrd as a simple, self-service way for any employee to leverage a company’s most crucial asset – it’s data – to prioritize tasks better, and fuel growth through informed business decisions.”
According to the 2022 annual Data and AI Leadership Executive Survey, conducted by NewVantage Partners, strategic advisors to Fortune 1000 clients, “achieving data-driven decision-making remains an elusive aspiration for most organizations.” The survey indicated that only 26.5% of companies report that they have created a data-driven organization and just 19.3% indicate that they have established a data culture. An astonishing 91.9% of executives point to the culture as the greatest impediment to achieving more effective business outcomes.
It is nearly impossible for frontline employees to make data-driven decisions in a corporate culture that forces them to depend on analysts, integration developers, and other company gatekeepers to make data-led decisions. This dependency significantly slows down marketing, sales, and customer retention efforts. Employees that impact the company’s bottom line have a critical need for simple access to corporate data.
Forwrd’s AI-based SaaS enables all employees, regardless of technical skills, to build predictive applications that detect hidden opportunities and critical risks in corporate data and recommends actions likely to convert, retain, and expand customers. Under the hood is a powerful combination of scoring technology that ranks leads and customers, a smart prioritization engine that organizes which leads to pursue first, and personalized next-best-action recommendations. Recommendations are delivered via notifications right inside the business apps employees already use like Salesforce, Hubspot, Slack, Google Chrome, and more.
This no-code tool is user friendly, creating simplicity, so that any employee can base decisions on hard data in minutes, instead of days and weeks, driving tremendous corporate value and improved efficiencies across the organization.
