Riga-based AI startup RivalSense has raised an angel round led by Change Ventures, with Fiedler Capital and local business angels also participating.
RivalSense allows users to track their competitors with AI. Every week users receive a curated, readable update with the most important competitor insights, including changes in pricing, product changes, new hires, regulatory issues, clients, suppliers, tech stack, regulatory challenges, media mentions, and corporate filings. RivalSense markets its product to founders of startups and mid-to-top level executives in more established companies.
The company is founded by serial entrepreneurs Martins Vaivars and Arturs Prieditis, two Techstars alumni who have now founded several machine learning companies together. Vaivars is an Oxford University graduate who previously worked for data visualisation startup Infogram, while Prieditis is a Cambridge University graduate who worked in engineering roles for Qualcomm and HP Autonomy.
The founders arrived at the idea based on frustration with the available tools to track competitors in their previous startups. “Ask any founder, and they will say that properly following competition is a big pain and they would prefer not to do it all. But doing it is indispensable, since it helps with product direction, sales and hiring”, according to Vaivars. “We are creating a simple, appealing, self-service SaaS product out of a complex, expensive, enterprise-focused product category. Founders and executives can now be up to date with everything in their space while spending less than 5 minutes per week.”
“In the first week after launch our user noticed in an insight that one of their fiercest competitors has silently removed a key client logo from their website. The user immediately sent this to their sales team. In the next week, the same user saw an insight of how a senior engineer of his competitor has ended his employment term on Linkedin, indicating he is ready to be approached with a job offer”, Prieditis says. “That was a big “Aha” moment for us. We realised that what we are doing with these insights provides a lot of value.”
Vaivars continues: “We are obsessive readers of tech and politics newsletters, and it made sense that a beautiful weekly e-mail or Slack update is the right way to deliver competitor insights. Executives and founders are extremely busy people, and the last thing they need is another app or platform to log into. The recent advances in AI enable us to not only notice competitor events but also to evaluate their business significance and deliver insights rather than a random list of keyword links.”
RivalSense is planning to use new investment funds to nail scalable user acquisition and introduce additional AI capabilities to uncover competitor insights. RivalSense currently relies on more than 80 sources for their weekly updates, including competitor websites, social media accounts, financial filings, and business databases.
“We are thrilled to support RivalSense, having followed this highly experienced and resilient founder duo for several years,” said Andris K. Berzins, Partner at Change Ventures. “I have seen so many competitive intelligence solutions over the years. All ended up focused on enterprises, eventually becoming non-scalable consulting businesses. The RivalSense team’s vision to target SMBs with a scalable, cost-effective solution sets them apart in this industry.”
