Joseph Rutakanga spent eight years looking for tools to help companies gather consumer insight data. Eventually, he decided to just build them.
Now his startup, called Rwazi, has raised a $12 million Series A led by Bonfire Ventures to help companies with market intelligence and consumer insights. He founded the company in 2021 with co-founder Eric Sewankambo.
“There was an abundance of consumer and market-level data for places like the U.S., UK, and a few parts of Western Europe, maybe some traces in Canada and Australia. But when it came to international markets, including economic giants like India, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Turkey, and China, there was nothing usable,” he told TechCrunch. “No real picture on consumption, what consumers wanted, or how their behavior was shifting.”
At first, he thought to solve the issue by purchasing statistics from government trade agencies. But eventually, he found that data to be outdated, fragmented, or sometimes simply nonexistent. He then turned to buying consumer reports and found them often inaccurate or hard to prove.
“The solution wasn’t surveys. It wasn’t panels. It was what we now call zero-party data; consumption data that’s voluntarily shared by the consumer, within their own routines, captured using advanced validation and verification systems, across any location, in real time,” Rutakangwa said.
The pair via their startup, ended up building an AI-powered intelligence software system that lets businesses have real-time visibility into their consumer markets. It helps predict consumer behavior and identify important areas to pay attention to, which, in turn, can help reduce the cost of customer acquisition and boost customer loyalty. Rwazi customers include top consumer companies such as Coca-Cola, Pampers, Visa, and Nestle, per Rwazi’s website.
The company previously raised a $4 million seed round in 2022, also led by Bonfire Ventures.
Rutakangwa described the fundraising process this time around as “selective,” saying he and Sewankambo focused on “finding the right partners, those who deeply understood the problem.” Other investors in this round include Santa Barbara Ventures, Newfund, and Alumni Ventures.
Rwazi said it will use the fresh capital to scale its AI co-pilot to help its clients make more accurate real-time decisions. It also hopes to hire more engineers. It currently pulls data from 190 countries, with customers primarily in the U.S. and Europe. The goal, as Rutakangwa said, is to continue building infrastructure that captures the evolving world of consumer data.
Rwazi does have competition,n including from legacy consumer insights companies GFK and Ipsos. But Rutakangwa said Rwazi is different from its competitors because it doesn’t rely on modeled or inferred data. Instead, its own infrastructure allows for insight and execution; knowing what to do and what to do about it, he continued.
“Winning today means anticipating shifts, seeing around corners, and making confident moves before the competition even senses a change,” he said.
