The Deloitte Tech Fast 50 Finland has just been announced and Nordic startup Cambri is thrilled to have made the listing - at number 32, no less! It’s incredible to think that in just over 4 years, this innovative and insights-focused company is experiencing such steady growth and achieving such impressive milestones.
Incredible, yet not too surprising, given that Cambri was always on a mission, even from the very start. The story began just four years ago in 2018. With Harvard Business School reporting that up to 95% of products fail soon after launch, Dr Heli Holttinen detected the need to provide a service to analyse consumer behaviour and trends to both reduce waste and dramatically improve a product’s chance of success.
And so, Cambri was born. Inspired by the Cambrian Explosion, a period of exciting growth and diversification of life forms on earth, it seemed the perfect namesake for the innovative startup, symbolising its commitment to fuelling product innovation with the right tools and mindset for evolution and growth. Shortly afterwards, in 2019, co-founders Dani Kamras and Dr Outi Somervuori joined forces to strengthen Cambri’s expert portfolio of services. Since then, this bold, confident and knowledgeable little company has dared to go the extra mile to provide hundreds of other companies with premium quality insights.
How Cambri remains relevant even in today's current uncertain climate
The need to take new products to market faster and more successfully has never been more crucial for consumer brands. If we take a look around, we see competition and the speed of change in the market is just increasing. Consumer brands want to test their ideas early and often to stay in the game. They want to make informed decisions quickly but they're very aware how important it is not to sacrifice the quality of the consumer insights they obtain. No matter what B2C company you talk to, they all want to become more data driven, more agile and lean.
No matter what B2C company you talk to, they all want to become more data driven, more agile and lean.
For a long time, this was more of an idyllic notion than a reality for the majority of companies. However, as an automated consumer insights and concept testing platform, Cambri has brought the dream to life, helping other companies across Europe. "Undoubtedly, the timing for Cambri has been good because the need for Cambri is there and we act as a positive change agent," says Founder Dr Heli Holttinen.
Milestones along the journey
Cambri has already become a well-established player in its home market, the Nordics, where it works closely with most of the larger FMCG and CPG companies. In addition, it is showing promising growth in central Europe and recently opened a new location in the thriving tech city of Barcelona.
"Consumer brands want to test their ideas early and often to make informed decisions quickly without sacrificing the quality of the consumer insights."
The announcement that Cambri made the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Finland was just another string to the impressive Cambri bow. Yet, on hearing the news, Heli said, "This isn't only about us. It shows how the consumer research industry is in flux. The winners of today are those service providers who enable process/workflow automation and rapid project turnarounds as well as help consumer brands to make better decisions through advanced analytics and AI-enabled insights."
Dr Apramey Dube, Dr Outi Somervuori, Dr Tommi Pajala and Dr Hongyu Su representing Cambri at Deloitte.
Co-founder Dani Kamras added, "It is a proud moment. We are very proud of how we have implemented automated workflows and advanced methods and AI algorithms into our platform in a way where even a person who has never worked with consumer research themselves before can now benefit from advanced and valid insights rapidly to make better business decisions."
Although clearly a key element to their success, there is more going on beind the scenes than advanced technology and automated workflows. Cambri understands the importance of building and maintaining close relationships with clients to establish trust and, of course, use customer feedback to tweak and continue improving the platform. "We have a very tight collaboration and dialogue with our existing clients in how we develop our platform, to ensure they will be able to get even more value out of it in their innovation process. We also cooperate and follow the academia, in order to automate the most recent and useful methods and frameworks in our cambri platform," Heli commented.
"The winners are those service providers who enable process/workflow automation and rapid project turnarounds while helping consumer brands make better decisions through advanced analytics and AI-enabled insights."
Looking to the future
In light of all this success, what’s next for Cambri? "We’re keen to keep up our momentum and are currently putting a lot of effort into expanding in the Benelux region and the UK, where we have already got some really great clients," states Heli. "We are, of course, concentrating a large part of our efforts on showcasing our Nordic no nonsense, simple but robust platform and services to more companies in these markets."
With regard to the product, Cambri is under constant development to be the best platform for innovation teams to work in a data-driven and iterative way. "Our vision is that every team can run iterative product development so that less process and outome waste is created," Heli points out. A company with both a mission and a strong sense of social responsibility, Cambri is stronger than ever and this is reflected in its new brand identity that is currently being rolled out.
Watch this space for the full reveal soon!