What’s today’s special? It’s SignalFlare.ai, the decision intelligence platform for chain restaurants and newly crowned 2024 Snowflake Startup Challenge winner!
SignalFlare.ai seeks to help restaurant chains manage their pricing and profit without alienating customers. Driven by algorithms developed by CEO and company founder Michael Lukianoff, SignalFlare offers machine learning (ML) models that prepare price and promotion by place, product, people and period.
“Restaurants is a really narrow-margin business,” Lukianoff said. “When you see these outrageous prices, oftentimes they’re just bad decisions.
“When we deliver this product to these restaurants, [it’s] actually helping to keep their doors open,” he continued. “By being powered by Snowflake and being able to integrate all the new innovations here, we’re bringing this to a whole new set of restaurants who haven’t been able to make these decisions and be empowered.”
Benoit Dageville, President of Product at Snowflake, welcomes SignalFlare.ai CCO Jayne Strickland and CEO Michael Lukianoff to the Snowflake Startup Challenge winners club.
SignalFlare.ai serves up decision intelligence for restaurant chains
The SignalFlare.ai solution combines data from sources, such as mobile and credit card data, point-of-sale data, local economic data and geospatial data, and determines the risk associated with various scenarios. Instead of just handing over this analyzed data, however, SignalFlare presents simulations so management can make the best decision based on their goals and level of risk tolerance.
Having this level of insight available to technical and nontechnical users can be transformative in an industry that’s constantly concerned with cost efficiency. Jayne Strickland, CCO of SignalFlare.ai, noted that one of the company’s first clients, a regional restaurant chain, has realized $2.7 million in incremental revenue. “On a $75,000 investment, that’s a 36x ROI,” she said. “That’s what our clients want most.”
A grand stage for the grand finale
The Startup Challenge finale began at Snowflake Dev Day, as finalists BigGeo, Scientific Financial Systems (SFS) and SignalFlare.ai took to the stage to make their pitches to the four Startup Challenge judges: Benoit Dageville, Co-Founder and President of Product at Snowflake; Denise Persson, CMO at Snowflake; Lynn Martin, President at NYSE Group; and Brad Gerstner, Founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital.
The power and flexibility of the Snowflake platform was on full display, with all three companies noting the importance of Snowflake offerings such as Snowpark, Cortex, Snowflake Native Apps and Snowpark Container Services in their solutions. Judges took note of this and several other factors during the presentations.
“The team is super important — the passion, the excitement,” said Dageville. “Also, the innovation. And of course leveraging what we’re building day after day: the AI Data Cloud.”
Once the pitches wrapped up, the focus moved to the judging panel. “I personally love that the value proposition of every one of these [companies] is anchored off of mission-critical data and doing things quickly with mission-critical data,” said Martin. “It’s a tough decision.”
After an intense on-stage deliberation — Gerstner noted some split decisions, and Martin mentioned “a little bit of arm wrestling” — the judges handed SignalFlare.ai the coveted snowboard trophy.
Previous Startup Challenge winners offer advice to new champion
The co-founders of Maxa, last year’s Startup Challenge winner, were in the Dev Day crowd to watch the finale and offered some perspective on what’s in store for SignalFlare.ai.
“The Startup Challenge is really the gift that keeps on giving,” said Raphael Steinman, Co-CEO of Maxa. “We just raised a massive Series A, and it started the day after winning the Challenge and being onstage. The exposure is second to none.”
Maxa Co-CEO Alexis Steinman echoed that sentiment, noting that the company has doubled in size and tripled revenue in the year since its Startup Challenge win. Snowflake Native Apps have been a key part of that success; Steinman noted that the Snowflake Native Apps give small startups the security, governance, control and speed they need to approach larger enterprise accounts.
“[Snowflake] is really telling the story that if you build on top of Snowflake you’re better, faster, stronger, more valuable. I think these companies are going to benefit a lot from that,” Raphael said.
Congratulations to the runners-up: BigGeo and SFS
BigGeo and SFS made strong showings in the final round, and each will be considered for up to $250,000 in potential funding from Snowflake.
BigGeo accelerates geospatial data processing by optimizing performance and eliminating challenges typically associated with big data. Built atop BigGeo’s proprietary Volumetric and Surface-Level Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS), which manages surface-level, subsurface and aerial data, BigGeo Search allows users to perform geospatial queries against large geospatial data sets and at high speeds. Capable of a headless deployment into Snowpark Container Services, BigGeo can be used to speed up queries of data stored in Snowflake, gather those insights into a dashboard, visualize them on a map and more.
Beating the market is the driving force for investment management firms — but beating the market is not easy. Quotient, from Scientific Financial Systems (SFS), provides a unique set of analytics tools, based on data science and ML best practices, that rapidly analyze large amounts of data and enable accurate data calculations at scale, with full transparency into calculation details. Quotient automates data management, time-series operations and production so investment firms can focus on idea generation and building proprietary alpha models to identify market insights and investment opportunities.
Join the Powered by Snowflake Startup Program
If you’re a startup building on Snowflake, be sure to check out the Powered by Snowflake Startup Program and the upcoming Startup Demo Days. And keep watch for information about the next Snowflake Startup Challenge: Complete this form to be notified when the 2025 contest opens.