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Read the pitch deck that a startup used to raise $150 million led by SoftBank to help retailers add live videos to their sites
Firework
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- Startup Firework sells software that lets retailers place live video on their sites.
- It raised a $150 million Series B round led by SoftBank.
- See key slides from the pitch deck that helped it land its biggest investment round yet.
Firework, a startup whose software lets retailers host livestreaming and shoppable videos on their websites, raised a $150 million Series B round led by SoftBank earlier this week.
CEO and cofounder Vincent Yang said his tools help retailers use live video to grab sales. Live video will account for $35 billion in US sales by 2024, according to retail analyst firm Coresight Research.
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Firework’s 900 clients, including grocers like Albertsons and Fresh Market, want to build live commerce tools to make their websites more engaging so more people will visit and so they’ll be to collect more first-party data, Yang said.
Yang said Firework clients are racing to build live shopping on their website because tech giants like YouTube, Amazon, and Facebook also have live commerce tools. Retailers and grocers want consumers flocking to their websites, not to the big platforms.
Since launching in 2017, Firework has raised a total of $235 million and most recently netted $55 million last year. Yang said Firework raised a much larger amount this time to potentially acquire companies that specialize in visual analytics and image recognition.
Visual analytics and image recognition would let Firework detect products in a video and build a dataset to recommend relevant content to users. This will ensure a vegan, for example, doesn’t see the same content as a meat lover on a retailer’s website, Yang said.
Firework is also trying to expand into sectors beyond the retailers, CPGs, and DTCs it typically works with. Specifically, it hopes to work with companies in publishing, financial services, and healthcare.
Yang envisions banks using Firework’s livestreaming for customer service and healthcare companies hostingĀ preventative care lectures.
Scroll down to read key slides from Firework’s pitch deck that helped it raise its biggest round to date.
Firework claims live shopping will transform commerce.
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Firework says the changing ways that people communicate with each other and share content will transform how they shop.
Firework
China offers a glimpse into retail’s future, with eMarketer projecting more than $470 billion in live shopping sales in 2022 for the country.
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Firework says it can help publishers, retailers, and advertisers build live shopping on their websites, outside big platforms like Facebook and TikTok.
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Firework says its software tools can help retailers’ websites engage customers more.
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Firework says its tools lead to higher rates of engagement, sales, and customer retention.
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Firework positions itself as a b2b software company that serves enterprise clients and doesn’t try to take their web traffic.
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Firework says it’s the biggest live commerce platform, clocking billions of seconds in livestreams.
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Firework notes that over the past 18 months, livestreaming has grown 15x.
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Firework burnishes its retail credentials with executives from Google, Walmart Media Group, and Albertsons.
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